Wreston Ford
by xkurieua
Summary: Taking place within the A Pup Named Scooby Doo Universe, Wreston Ford is a slice-of-life tale regarding the romantic pursuits of Scooby Doo.
1. Exposition I

Pressured against his people to sign the bill, Scooby took off with his pen and sneakers and found his way over to the supermarket, where he would have to get some more sneakers.

"I'll take one, not two, pairs of shoes, please." Scooby nervously looked at this boy, with his shoes untied, wondering whether he was going to waste the only pair of the shoes that the dog wanted, himself, after the purchase was made and the boy managed to make his way out of the door. Who's going to offend who? Who's going to pay the toll to leave the island and never return? These were the fundamental questions concerning Scooby Doo.

What relief the dog must have felt when the boy actually did not have enough money to pay for the shoes. While a mildly offensive scene took place, and this warranted the guard coming and taking the boy away by the ankles, throwing a tantrum upside-down, this did not phase Scooby in the slightest, because the pair of shoes that he wanted was actually on the counter there, still waiting to be purchased by someone who actually had a responsible grasp of their funds.

"Excuse me, but I have actually been looking at those shoes for a while. I read in this article that they were one of the hottest selling items of the year, and well, I really should see if the hype's all it's cracked up to be." Scooby looked at the black box carrying the sneakers that would surely overshadow the ones that he currently had on.

"You know, my son has a pair of these sneakers and they're practically all he ever talks about now. Previously, any footwear that we managed to pop on to our son's feet would result in severe blistering and systemic edema. You should know that our son is morbidly obese."

"I think I have heard of your son. In this town, with all of its upscale advantages, word gets around pretty quickly if there's someone obese living amongst us."

"Right, and luckily he's been losing weight ever since these new shoes. They have given him the confidence to go to the gym and now I have a feeling that he is going to become the strongest member of the family. I should let you know that he lives with me and solely with me, seeing as how the father left the family about 20 years ago to devote his life to fishing."

"Yes, I heard about that in the newspaper. It appears that he got just what he wanted, because he died while he was out at sea."

"Exactly, it was the only death he could of had any form of acceptance towards. Anyways, this pair of shoes is going to cost you $39.80."

"Ah, excellent. This is going to be the first time in a few years where I have managed to pay exact change." Scooby handed the cashier exact change for the sneakers and the shoes were bagged and given to the pup. They exchanged repeated farewells and Scooby left through the automatic doors and back out into the street, waiting for new challenges to meet him as he returned back to his house.

"I find that the best three boys in the town were all pregnant, and sapped of their energy, I had to find even more recess time while also fishing around for the keys that my father had hidden in my pajamas. This called for no mental cooperation of mine, and I fetched over even more wasted time and effort to confirm that my father was, in fact, messing with me. This really took a toll on both my patience and my overall satisfaction for the day, so I shoved him off the roof of my house and he died."

"You didn't do that, you goofball."

Two kids were swinging next to each other on a swingset that was placed in the front lawn of a suburban home that was in the path of Scooby's return to his own house. The kids were talking about things that they had rehearsed the previous day and really I took most of my own understanding to mention that they would have probably continued swinging on those swings until midnight if Scooby had not intervened with his sacked shoes and his black pen glistening in the sun, providing him as a beacon of interest to whoever happened to see the animal pass by.

"Well, would you look at that? Hello puppy, my name is Richard, and I was just talking to my friend about the daily onslaught of knowledge I have learned while I was still young and in charge of how I got to spend my time. I live with a father that has all of the best intentions for me but only recently supported the idea that the best thing for me would be to leave me to my own devices. Look at these red shorts that I have purchased with my own money, that I have stolen from someone who wasn't paying attention to their surroundings, and also, look at this wristwatch, although this was actually a hand-me-down from my older brother. These two items have done nothing but solidify the fact that I am of the best wishes of my family and thus, achieving the most beneficial story-telling concretes, I was previously denominated for a second role in the star-action lawsuit, the refined trust of my people."

"You know, Richard, I was just wondering how long it was going to take me to get home, and I had a perfectly arranged set of variables that I could take into consideration while at the same time confirming my time of arrival. However, you were not one of these foreseeable variables, and now I am going to be late. You have surprised me more than anything else today, and I had just gotten back from a botched bill-signing, which I steadily declined, but I did manage to not let the person who had borrowed my pen take it away from me."

"Okay, good, I should mention my name as well though." The unnamed friend got off of the swing and shook Scooby's hand. His name was Tylenol (actually Tyler, but he and his friend Richard thought that the nickname set himself apart from the 23 other Tylers that happened to go to school with them) and he had most of his assets already in the bag, so to speak. He had some of the best teeth of any child that Scooby had ever seen, and was really counting on the sunlight that was shining over them right now to display this dental achievement as proudly as possible.

"That's a set of teeth alright, but I did manage to get the last pair of these sneakers from the grocery store, and they have been making me quite excited to try them on. I found that these were one of the most talked-about shoes in the current public consciousness, and this really got my hopes high. Do you have any friends that own this pair of shoes?"

"Yes, there is this obese kid... well, I should say previously obese kid, by the name of Hetmon-Lo who managed to get a pair of the shoes on him, and it completely transformed who he was. I could go as far as saying that the kid's likable now. He is one of the strongest kids in our class and even warrants a couple kids following him wherever he goes. I don't know what it is about those shoes, but they really seem to put you in a good place no matter where you are." Richard seemed to be paying undivided attention to Scooby's bag while saying all of this.

"So you got a pair yourself, Scooby?", Tylenol asked.

Scooby walked a couple laps from the sidewalk around the swingset and back on the sidewalk. He did this 5 times, but it is important to note that Scooby actually wasn't counting how many times he was circling around them.

"See, I'm already tired. I don't think I'm unhealthy or anything, but I can't really put much focus on doing any sort of deliberate task without feeling incredibly tired afterwards. I think this is what happened when I had so many people pressuring me to sign a bill. This was a bill that I didn't even know the insides and outsides about, but public opinion destined me to sign this piece of paper. Luckily, I got fed up with all the pressure and managed to leave the place with my pen and my old sneakers. For once in a sign of cowardice, I didn't manage to leave any of my belongings behind, so I felt pretty lucky considering, and decided to celebrate by buying these sneakers. Do you realize that this was the last pair left at the store, and I only got it because the kid ahead of me, who was about to purchase them, did not have enough money? He had to have a security guard throw him out of the store because he had a big tantrum."

"Yes, we saw the kid in question stomp back over this way not too long before we saw you. He was pulling his hair out and looked grumpier than most people in retirement homes. I think he was going to try to find some place to physically harm himself in order to quell the severe rage that was obviously pent up inside of him, but I didn't really pay attention to exactly which part of the neighborhood he was going to end up at." Tylenol seems slightly amused at the way he was describing the child.

Scooby brushed off some dust from his face, and looked at how far down the sun had dropped since he had stopped to talk to the school kids.

"It seems that I have let my interest in you two get the better of me, because the sun is telling me that I need to get home before it gets dark."

"Yes, we're sort of impressed we managed to keep you so long." Richard and Tylenol exchanged glances with each other and grinned, then they both looked at Scooby. Scooby grinned back and it was clear that they would be on good terms the next time they saw each other. They did not say good-bye to Scooby as he left, however.

* * *

The sweat was finally getting to Scooby Doo, and as he approached seven more layers of concrete to get himself situated on, he placed his paws over his face and wept at the amount of insects that were crawling on the wall that had halted him completely. It was a scene from some sort of severe religious retribution, as if all of the mistakes that Scooby had made in his short life had culminated together into one singular image, and this was an image that Scooby could agree summed up his misguided life completely. It was made on a registrar's account, that besides from this striking imagery, that there was nothing around of merit to catch Scooby's attention, which was perfect, as this would allow the striking, infested wall as being Scooby's only real means of stimulation for the next half hour.

"I was tired of being at the forefront by the first sixteen hours of the adventure. All these people were looking to me to provide great and substantial changes to the community that they had grown up in, and when I had to decline their offers, because I knew that just as I had to go through this period of time, this era... with all of the rewards and setbacks of my upbringing, I had to fight against it in my own special way to get to this point of power in the first place... and considering this, I could not just let these people have an easier way to live. A simple bill could not manage to change how they thought, and I knew this was the only way I could really insist that I was doing the right thing. What I didn't seem to keep in mind is that these people couldn't handle a "No." from someone who they had put so much of their effort into believing great things from, and things had gotten sour. They did not want me to say "No."... they wanted to convince me that I just wasn't thinking clearly and that this would be the most beneficial thing to the community. Once one voice dissented from my refusal, several others joined in, and really it became too much for me to tolerate. The cameras did not flash yet, but I wanted to get out of there before they did... and I left without a single trace of me ever being there."

It looked as though the insects on the wall sped up in their travel, and Scooby was becoming less and less disturbed by the wall. He managed to walk around it and found that the sidewalk continued the way it was supposed to, and he managed to set all of his steps in the right direction, finally making his way over to a drainage area that sloped 10 feet from the sides of a bridge. The crossing of the bridge was as wet and as cold as any single person could expect, and by the time that the streetlights had turned off, and then from there, turned on again, it looked like Scooby managed to cross the entire thing without any issue. However, looking back:

"It was one of those moments where I felt completely unsafe. The crossing of the bridge was startling to every fiber of Scooby Doo from the first to the last step, and all of that clamminess must have caused some sort of infectious agent to slalom up and down my spinal cord. The wetness was not one that you would typically find on this planet. This was a wetness that was reserved to caves which had no opening to the outside. It was an encapsulated kind of water that was rich in minerals that spring water would have no idea how to tolerate, and it oozed on your skin like some sort of clinical lubricant, set off to make you feel like you were an amphibious experiment who would never get a copy of the results themselves. There were all sorts of flower petals that kept coming into my mind, fluttering away again using the same trajectory... purple petals, white spiky petals, the green petals... I have not given the edge of accountability to myself to discover what the names of these flowers were, but in my travel across they were all I could really think about. It was sort of like if you have a jack-o'-lantern following you around but it wasn't carved out of a pumpkin but it was some sort of black glossy gourd, one that was painted on before by another human, and you could only make out the details of its face when the light, from my pen, shined on it just right. Luckily, this didn't happen, as I had these thoughts of flowers in my head, and I was able to escape the wetness and cold without even realizing that I was doing it."

The sun was still out, but crossing the bridge made it seem like there was never any sunlight out to begin with. That is because very large trees covered this area and did not permit much sunlight into the area.

Scooby was remembering this part of the neighborhood, because this is where his house would be waiting for him. You had some red mailboxes that were all open and ready to receive mail from a car. You had all of the lawns cut to size and ready to hold some houseplants in them, and you also had garages that were mostly closed so as to not make the garage too hot when the father got into them from the door inside the house and to check on if there were any problems that needed to be dealt with. Luckily, these were well-maintained garages and frequently there would not be any problems. The streetlights cast some green light over the street and it looked like the grass on the lawn matched the color of the street if you gave it quick enough glances. The tribal belongings of all the houses were all stashed inside waiting for you to become friends with the owners and know them well enough to get invited over to the houses before you could really see just all of what they had collected over the years.

"If I could bench press as much as the other kids at my school, I would have them know that they would all be in for a world of pain! Cast aside all of these childish troubles and ensue on a rampage that would make them all gawk at me through broken jaws!"

This was not the child who had been kicked out of the store some time ago, but actually a little girl who seemed to also be down on her luck, playing in the lawn of a house that looked completely dark on the inside. She had both a dolly and a beach ball, but whereas the dolly was laying on the lawn and not in the girl's possession, the beach ball was in the hands of the girl complaining. She did happen to look at Scooby walking past her, and she smiled and forgot that she was even upset in the first place.

"Scooby, wait for me! You must tell me how things have been going for you today!"

"Elisa, I could not forget to tell you. It is pleasant to see you, I came back from some pretty hefty arrangements."

"Oh Scooby, please don't tell me that you had a bad day as well."

"I wouldn't consider it a bad day. You could say that even good days have their share of undesirable qualities. Even so, I did manage to get something nice for myself and really, that's all I needed to have happen in order for me to feel good about today." Scooby lifted up the bag he was carrying in his mouth higher so that Elisa could see the logo of the sneakers that he had bought.

"It's those sneakers you wanted!" She grinned at the black box. "I was under the impression that these would not be at the grocery store you go to!"

"Well, they were the last pair that the store had for sale, and I managed to get them through the rotten lack of another child, who I still don't know the name of, even though I met up with a couple of kids that also saw this kid. While not worried about him in the slightest, I still wouldn't wish for him to hurt himself, as it appeared that he was about to do, according to the two boys that I met earlier."

"You would think that Richard and Tylenol are troublemakers, but y-"

"Oh, you know them too."

Scooby did happen to interrupt Elisa while she was talking, and the silence of both of them does offer the reader of the story to be taken back by how orchestrated and pretty the sound of the birds around them managed to be. They weren't really sounds of birds that you would be accustomed to hearing in a neighborhood, and I would go as far as to say that there was almost a sort of tropical flair to the overall instrumentation here. Please, if you haven't already, take a moment to let this all sink in and provide you with a good amount of headspace before returning to the story.

* * *

"I thought that Richard and Tylenol were troublemakers initially, but I got to know them after school and they both seem to rather just be a very observant pair of children. They seem to know what's happening in their community, whether it's their business to or not, and as such, they can provide you with good clarification to how things are working out and whether there are things that you should be weary about."

"I did get that vibe from them. They both seemed to be pretty knowledgeable, and I will probably have to keep this in mind in case I see them outside again... I had a couple of scary moments traveling back down here. There was this wall I had never seen before, which sported an infestation of some kinds of beetles... I really don't know my insects well but these were pretty sickening. Next, I had to cross the bridge I normally did and it felt like I was somewhere completely different - the experience was confusing and I can still remember the wetness that was on my body, and it was like something that in infant experiences for the first time when they exit the womb. Completely remarkably a part of the real world, but you just have not happened to take part in witnessing the sensation until that point."

"Well, I think you have had a somewhat stressful day Scooby, and perhaps you just forgot entirely about what that bridge is like."

"I won't dismiss that idea entirely, but overall I'm just looking forward to trying these sneakers on."

"Well, I'm sure you will like how they fit on you. They're supposed to turn you into a better person, and that's saying a lot given that those are pretty inexpensive."

"Yes, I will have to report back on you and tell you if they have changed my laugh."

They both exchanged laughter at this, as if Scooby was being sarcastic when he said that, but I think the overall reason behind why they laughed is something that can only culminate by being acquaintances of a particular person for a while. "You're always a witness to the betterment of my day, Scooby. I wish that I was as old as you so I could share the amount of wisdom you provide." "You don't give yourself enough credit, Elisa." Scooby walked on down the neighborhood, taking several sharp turns where he needs to take sure turns and this resulted in the ever-ending amusement of him trying to find his way back home. Scooby knows by now that his tendency to wander isn't completely misguided, because his subconscious is still heavily at work providing his body with the details needed to maneuver him back to familiar parts of town, and indeed, that is what he did in this instance, and he was glad that he could toss so much care aside while his body ensured him that he was not going to end up anywhere distasteful.

The newspapers were starting to appear in the mailboxes, and Scooby knew that the more vibrant shades of his community were revealing themselves to him. This, in a sense, was the part of the neighborhood that Scooby Doo felt committed to. You started seeing neighbors outside, waving at Scooby, and also talking to each other about various things. There was less of the sense that you were walking across a giant blemish and more of a sense that this was somewhere you could walk through without any worries in the world. The plants that were part of the customization of the people's fancy all had an appropriate amount of care done to them, as they were all faultless and provided a nice touch of floral color to the world that Scooby walked through.

The sprinkler systems all turned on in patterns that, while giving away the price range of the sprinkle systems, also seemed to provide a function of just brining a mild sense of awe when you passed by them. Sure, these sprinkler systems played a part in keeping the lawn healthy, but there was a stronger purpose to the excess that was put into setting this particular model up, and that was to invite you into the possibility that yes, we're not quite in a time where the space age is making us the crowning achievement of our piece of turf in the galaxy, but ever yet still, you can be provided with a reason to be content, surprised, and enriched by what's around you, and given the patterns of water distribution that these sprinklers sprayed, and given the complexity of the shapes and activities that the water droplets provided, with even the blades of grass offering to partake in the fiesta, flinging healthy droplets of water to other blades of grass and creating a grand network of moisture, this came back to you in a way that allowed you to appreciate your neighbors a little more than you would have otherwise.

A man was sharing a pretzel bowl with himself, and know that he had taken a good deal of preparation in eating this pretzel bowl as he did the night before, with the cheddar chicken and green peas accentuating the meal, and he did happen to gaze upon Scooby Doo walking on his share of the sidewalk.

"Why, hello Scooby! I've got some of my neighbor's apples, if you wouldn't mind taking some off my hands!"

"You've really got me thinking that I can just take things from you, Mr. Peters? Do you think I don't know what sort of business you're trying to arrange with me. A guaranteed steal, you'll argue. Worth more than every penny in your wallet, you insist. These jokes get older with every utterance, old man, and I'll have you know that the more I decline your offers, the better I'll feel about myself."

"Oh come now, Scooby. These are yellow-colored apples. Even though they're yellow, they haven't done bad - quite the opposite, actually."

"It takes quite a bit of patience to put up with your day-to-day nosing around, doesn't it? I might make you something myself, some sort of insidious offer of friendship... and I'll put the blame on someone that I know. Yes, I could afford to give you these windshield wipers, of which all they do is creating deep carving into your windshield and let the water in during that one fateful storm you happen to have to drive across town with... and you don't want to stop driving, even though you have found yourself infuriated at me. As soon as the hail starts coming down, you have figured out that I was just a means to put your life at risk... and if you survived this drive, you would make sure that you never had to deal with my contribution to your living again."

"Yes, Scooby. I'll admit, that these apples wouldn't be the best thing to give to you. It's just that I really have nobody else who's interested to take them off my hands... you at least provide the banter to tell me why my actions are wrong, and that's a better sign of hospitality than anything else that I'm used to, even from my own family."

"You show a humble side of yourself for once, Mr. Peters. I can't say that I'm not slightly impressed."

"I figure that since you have those sneakers purchased that I should start giving the benefits of your purchase to you before you even try the sons of bitches on."

"How thoughtful. Yes, I'm pretty eager to get these on my feet."

"As you should be, Scooby." The craigs of the town all settled down, and featuring nothing more than the passing of another fine day, the birds reached over through arcs of movement and landing in nesting sites to proliferate with their various kinds. You could hear lovemaking as something that, while not an invitation for you, is rather the invitation of the prospect that maybe you should provide a little love yourself. These were the hampered notions of evil that set themselves in flight every single night, keeping Scooby on the ever-paining reminder that were was no other dog like him in the entirety of his planet, and that any sense of establishing an intimate, physical connection with any other personality would be a disaster and would throw Scooby's already-nurturing self into the wind, resulting in a perverted outlook of life and that his menacing would commence, destroying the flights of stairs around him and marking his mark as a pest and a cancerous addition to the lives of his friends, and marking his mark as a disease of systemic consequences to any future sexual option.

* * *

When you mentioned that the concrete of the sidewalks was all nice in this town, it was actually where the road started, to becoming on that, was brick-paved where you started to actually get close to where the location of Scooby's house was. While the weeds were less attended to in this part of town, the quality of households had bumped up significantly, featuring parts of the place that had 3 to 4 doors for their respective garages, and that there was less of a need to have any sort of vehicle out in the street at this time. A mailbox could house nothing more than a slow in a totem of brick, to show that there would be no way that you could steal anything that didn't belong to you without the assurance that you'd have a key to unlock the totem.

"It was wishful thinking to start myself as being perhaps the only pup named Scooby Doo in town, and this was the start of my fundamental voyage to trying to enhance my being with shoes. You know, as these days go on, I had always imagined that when I do advance myself, I would be better at the position to advance the community around me. This is why I must feel as confident in myself as possible, so I can come back to the position of power with a more solidified grasp of my responsibilities to the people around me and a more solidified grasp of how I can segue all the problems of my community out through a proper stream and introduce the new goals and aspirations that will take our outlook on the world and feature it to be something stronger. This would make it something rare; an idea that you could look at with scrutiny, and it would bring over a wave of consoling excitement, however mild, and tell you to that, "Yes, if I became a part of this... I would not feel like a blind follower, but rather I would become a part of something that would necessitate me bring my ideas into it and would ultimately enrich me for joining. This is what was waiting for me in all of my patience." This, and this only, is the reaction I want to create in every well-meaning man, woman, and child on this great Earth."


	2. Exposition II

It took a loaf of bread and all the garnish in the house to find herself content with the meal that was thrown into the pressure cooker, because this is simply the way that Daphne cooks her food. It takes a little bit of everything to construct the dinners that last for days, and each of these dinners affects a different body part in each of their separate ways. This featured dish that was being rejuiced and unjuiced in a continuous cycle was likely all of the pork products put into a single mass, and the bread gives it a bit more consistency than it would otherwise, and it was a fundamental success, because the entire house smelled like the food. Daphne took it out with her bare hands and placed it on a serving plate to serve to herself and to herself alone. This suburban house was chock full of room, but as of today, she was the only resident. Underneath the napkin were the utensils that she prided herself in using, and underneath the coaster was a glass of the iced tea that she brewed without her recollection of having done so, but none of the ice inside of the glass had melted yet, so it wasn't of too much concern regarding where it came from.

"Piece together the fork, and then the napkin, and I'm all set." Daphne wavering hand was over the steaming meat product, and she could not seem to take the initiative to scoop out a piece for herself. She knew she could do so at any time, but something about making undue suspense for taking a bite was all that she could really handle at the moment.

"This is my food, and yet I don't work. How does this happen, how does this happen?" Daphne began to start losing interest in even eating, but the looseness of her clothes invited her to finally take a bite. While she did manage to bite into the fork itself, and this did hurt her teeth, she wasn't too disappointed with what she made. If you could imagine a poor-quality meatloaf, then chances are you could probably imagine what she was eating too.

She kept eating at this pace for as long as she could. With no obligations to meet and no distraction of networking to keep her from seeing the present with absolute focus and clarify, she continued eating throughout the hour, not so much savoring the taste of her food as much as she was savoring the fact that she could even be doing what she was doing at that moment in time. It wasn't gratitude, but more like intent study of her own actions and a fascination with them, mundane or otherwise.

Some knocking on the door took a while to bring Daphne to her senses, but when it did she didn't really put forth any expectation to herself regarding who might be trying to get in. The point was that if there's a knock that you answer, and this really was the only drive that lead Daphne to opening the door. She got up, but did not place her fork back on the table, because there was a distinct possibility that she was going to have to use that fork for things that weren't involved in feeding herself. Twirling the fork around in her hair, she opened the door to find a Pup Named Scooby Doo, damp by the rain that was outside, yet not dripping at all. All the moisture from the outdoors he retained in some sort of sleek coat of fur.

"Hi, Scooby Doo. I wasn't expecting to see you here."

"That's why I came, Daphne."

"If you make a habit out of this, I will not allow you to any more of my food."

"Is it really your food, Daphne?"

"Yes."

Scooby walked in with the pen tucked into his collar and the dropped the bag containing the box of shoes on the floor. He scanned off the staircase that met with the entrance of the house and noticed that it was completely dark up there. While this did portray a foreboding picture, the smell of the food over to the side, in the dinning room, gave Scooby enough of a change of pace to momentarily forget about the upstairs possibilities and he managed to make his way over to take a seat at the table.

"So you've decided to take up eating dog food, too?" Scooby said this as coldly as he could muster without laughing.

Daphne sat back down in her seat and continuing slowly eating her food. It ensnared her attention in sort of a slow and calculated way, making sure that her gaze was out of focus and that her breathing pattern was not audible, not even to puppy ears.

"When I made this food, I was thinking about all the little devils that were in those cartoons we used to watch. They had all the pitchforks and the crazy child-drawn faces. I remember because in between these commercials, you would have these cartoons... and in between these cartoons, you would have these commercials where there was old-fashioned diners serving very large amounts of meatloaf to truckers and other people of an adjacent trade. All these large-belled farmers could come and sit from end to end at a bar, no beers, and would just stuff themselves with these plus-sized plated of meatloaf and mashed potatoes. If you had a camera at one end that was placed so you could see all of their bellies, a time-lapse of two hours would give you insight into just how devastating this food was to an old man's gut."

"Yes, but I remember the cartoons more clearly, myself." Scooby scratched himself with his paw. "They all only spoke in two or three character-specific catchphrases that they cycled through over and over again without any real rhyme, reason, or context to what was going on around them. I think that's how some of the more basal varieties of birds must communicate to one another. They don't really have anything specific to say, but they figure that it's enough of a use to spout something, you know, because they can. I think that despite having no language, you can still get excited over the prospect that you can make noise. I think that's how a lot of your banter plays out, Daphne. You like hearing yourself talk, but you don't really care about what you're talking about."

"Enough, Scooby. You're starting to hurt my feelings." Daphne talked with food still in her mouth.

"Sure, I'll stop."

The clock in the dining room sounded like it was counting every half second, but the second hand would only move once per two of these sounds. It had a white border and a glossy sort of glare covering over the face, so you had to squint hard in order to tell what time was actually being told. The blinds to the windows were all the same color of wood as the table that Daphne was eating her food at and where Scooby was observing Daphne eating her food at. The napkins that were folded over on Scooby's end, unfortunately, did not have any utensils placed under them, but Scooby still used the napkin to his advantage to dab at his wet nose.

"What's in the bag, Scooby Doo?" Daphne glanced over at the bag just staying there, making a tiny puddle of rainwater underneath it on Daphne's tiled floor.

"I got some sneakers that I have been meaning to get for a while. I read about them in this sports magazine a while back and they apparently offered you an enhanced ability to enhance yourself... I think that was actually the tagline they used. Anyways, I've just been hearing a lot of great things about these sneakers from some of my friends and even just acquaintances that I'd be meeting in my daily travels, and I figured I'd finally shell out for a pair."

Daphne continued chewing her food.

"The price in the magazine was 39.98, and sure enough, with tax included, that was how much the pair cost me when I bought them at the grocery store. I had exact change too, so I was glad that that had panned out for me so well. There was this kid in front of me in line that was actually about to purchase this pair, and it was the last one that the grocery store had to offer, but he didn't have enough money and he had such an awful reaction to the fact that he couldn't purchase the shoes that he had to be escorted out by security, which, quite frankly, I was surprised that the grocery store even had."

"How much did they cost?" Daphne swirled her finger around in the broth that had accumulated at the bottom of her plate.

"They ended up costing me 39.98, all in all. I didn't think it would be a good time to try them on yet, seeing as how it's raining outside, and I think wet concrete wouldn't provide the best first experience that I could have with these things. I might try them out the first thing in the morning tomorrow and see how well these play out for me. I've been told that these can change a personality for the best, and I'm excited to see if that's at all possible for me." Scooby laughed at the last sentence he spoke.

"You only got one pair of shoes, Scooby?"

"They're men's running shoes, Daphne. Don't get too carried away."

* * *

After the dishes were cleaned to the best of their ability to be cleaned, and all the food was put away into the refrigerator for future use, and after all of the use napkins had been disposed in the trash, Scooby and Daphne offered themselves to the services of the leather sofa, of which they laid on in opposite ends of from each other, the armrests providing means to prop their child heads against, and the sofa was placed right in front of the fireplace, which managed to stay on all the time and exude warmth against an fake log of wood. The shadows of the room continued to cast themselves in the otherwise dark room, and all of the hidden dispositions of the items of furniture that were around them began to dance out. The dormant personalities of the lamp, the vases, the cabinets all started to flicker out with the flexibility of the fire's whim, and all of this dancing, which while entrancing, was only so if you allowed yourself to be dissuaded enough to actually fall for it. Really, all Scooby was thinking of was going to sleep, and it isn't so easy to discern whether Daphne actually thinks at all.

A morose darkness of nighttime threw itself over the two, and the clarity of vision in the room began to diminish, and they slowly passed out into nonalertness, and from there, into barely-alertness, and from there. nonalertness - back and forth, these states of being surfaced out of the dark in different shades, and at some points, even different hues of the dark. In the darkest of greens, the eyes were barely open in these individuals, and in the darkest of purples, the two had no recollection of where they were because they were sleeping, and in the darkest of golds, they emerged again... with the little sliver of consciousness they were allowing themselves to marvel at what sort of room they were in.

The cartoon that they were talking about earlier, with the childlike devils, was indeed a show that used to be broadcast when the dog and the girl were younger. It aired in the late morning hours, and featured devils of different colors pulling constant practical jokes on one another, usually only for the pranksters themselves to be pranked. Every character that wasn't a devil played their roles straight, and much of the humor came from them trying to rationalize and keep their composure as those devils did their rounds across the town. Some men allowed themselves to be enraged and attempt to retaliate against the devils, and some men simply let the devils be the devils that they were, and some men engaged with the devils and, eventually, split into several different kinds of devils themselves. One of the main problems of the show is that there was so many devils to account for, each with different names and personalities - normally, this wouldn't be too distracting, but the creators of the show made an effort to make sure that none of the devils remained to be one-off characters, so you had this very convoluted history of devils to keep track of in order to make sense of some of the pranks they pulled, and the reason behind why they chose which devil to prank.

The commercials in between the show were of a network of diners that were around the area of Coolsville that featured large amounts of country food as their selling points. Along with the meatloaf they were talking about earlier, you also had references to shakes, hamburgers and cheeseburgers, fried pickles, and ice cream scoops dressed up to be tennis balls. This last item mentioned was likely the craft of one of the newer employees that wanted to go for a novelty dessert item in order to attract some different people over to the restaurants. It was one of those places you could count on being singled out at if you had the gall in you to single yourself out. The homogeny of these sorts of diners is usually what the targeted demographic strives to go there for, first and foremost, before the actual quality of the food. If they can melt into a place where there will be no irritating stimuli to snap them out of the condition of their day-to-day bumbling, then that was considered to be a great value, despite the food being ordered being already so cheap.

The morning crept itself open to the world and basked the living room in light, allowing the two children to wake up, still on opposite ends of the sofa, and reconstitute themselves for the new day. New clothes, new collars, and new fragrances were put on these children, and they were sent off from their grogginess to start with their activities. Daphne was the sort of lady that would like to cook herself pancakes without suggesting to herself for a moment that any would-be guests would like to also partake in some eating, yet today, she did make an exception for Scooby Doo, and fed him dog food. Although Scooby hardly touched the stuff, he couldn't help but be curious as to why Daphne actually put the effort across to open up a tin of it for him, and why she would even have any dog food about, for that matter. The foods were eaten at the kitchen counter, and it pains me to say that neither of them allowed themselves to become full.

Scooby's shoes were waiting for him back at the entrance, and this was really what drove the puppy into making the decision to only eat a small amount of food. The shoes were put on and he was out the door, walking around at a quicker pace than he normally walks to see if the pair gave him any lift. He walked around the corners, glancing around anxiously to see if anyone would be noticing what he was doing out there, by himself, in the neighborhood, but nobody was out yet. This was an instance where everyone rather wanted to stay inside, and Scooby was the only surveillance the streets had to offer, with the dual noises of both his sneakers dully thudding against the concrete, and that of his claws tapping light taps in conjunction.

He took off from Crassick Street to Neds-Dooley Street, and from Neds-Dooley he took across to River Side, and from River Side he took across and winded up at a dead end, but from tracking his steps back and taking another direction, he winded up at the Stanford and Sterling streets, each parallel to one another. Standford ends short and takes off diagonally as Bentos-Town street, and Sterling continues for another few miles before splitting off into Red Moors, Liftelcluz, Van Daglia, Sapsuck, and Mortor Incline. Scooby walked along all of this, still weary of any attention being directed towards him, but none was whatsoever. The streets of the names, and the names of the streets became one and the same, and Scooby lost count over how many different ones he trekked through, and when he did remember, it was better to simply guess at the name through glances than to actually take hold of the attention and find out where he was, in case he wound up there again.

It was a precedent that all of the mailboxes would be open at the front with no mail in them and no flag sticking up to indicate that anyone had ever gotten anything from anyone. It was sort of like the entire place was sheltered off while still making a substantial effort to make the exteriors of these houses and their paired yards appear nice and well-maintained.

Scooby's unadorned paws were starting to ache from the type of walking he was allowing himself to take himself with, and he decided to take a rest next to a particular large mailbox next to a particularly large house that was probably a prime spot for children come time for Halloween. The sun had a gleaming presence over all of the reflective surfaces of the area that was around Scooby, and even some of the less-reflective surfaces had been invited to advertise the sun. It became wickedly hot outside, and heat waves slithered out of sewer openings and out of the horizon, making rounds through the neighborhood, sneaking into chimneys, wrapping around Scooby's tail, splashing into trees - completely irradiated, Scooby felt that it would be better to get back to Daphne's than to sit around and wait for things to get less intense. A steady gait lended itself to grant Scooby more confidence, and he started recalling the details of the streets he walked through as he retraced his steps. Cutting through the yards was Scooby's way of temporarily cooling off his bare paws for skittering out against into the baking surface, but eventually it was all of Scooby's attempt to merely run back to where he came from. From the running, there was yelping - the area had all-too-suddenly become hostile and forced Scooby to sprint with the totality of his effort in order to get anywhere. Again, the streets started being less important to Scooby than the basic instinct to just keep moving. It seemed like he had passed Daphne several times, with each occurrence showing her walk out from Scooby's peripheral vision and wave her hand invitingly.

Scooby walked back inside Daphne's house, panting unevenly and laid his face on the first step of the stairway, trying to find the composure that he's looking to give himself somewhere deep in the waterfall of his thoughts. He made an effort to glance back up the stairs, still dark with the same dark that cloaked the details of the second floor that was present when he arrived at night from the previous day.

* * *

"I'm not one much in charge of the seven boys who wound themselves up in the clinic, but I was found to be given them my word of mouth from much of a higher stature than that I was used to, given that I usually only talk to brats and in this circumstance, these were well-behaved and well-mannered boys who spoke like they had rehearsed talking to me. I can't deduce which is worse; the rapscallions, or the well-behaved and well-mannered boys." The man put his pen to his mouth, likely going over what he just said and nitpicking it for errors.

"Don't get too stressed out with this, Mr. Senator. All boys are willing to take heed of your word, well-behaved or behaved like that of a family of termites. You have no real reason to fret due to both... your elevation in power in light of recent events! You have become a spokesperson for this town, and I would hate it to see if any non-understanding eyes had happened to glance at your current lack of composure." This advisor had twisted his mustache, looking at the sweat droplets that were budding around Mr. Senator's eyebrows and jawline.

"You can't say that I don't hate this job, you must know. I think that despite the raised salary and the greater fostering of respect I still find myself feeling terminally ill. These children just get under my skin in unbelievable ways, sort of like they're forcing my tendons to go out of order and spill over themselves. I don't want to become the fountain of my own misery, and this is why I'm considering forfeiture of my position."

"Mr. Senator, please be reasonable. You have a whole crowd of aspiring youths out there to provide visualization to, and I would just hate it if you blinked out of the spotlight from them just like that. I urge you to stay in control of this... whatever anxiety that you're experiencing. I think a little bit more hands-on time with these kids would get you used to how they behave and respond to your words of advice and, from this, give you deeper satisfaction than that of which you had in your previous positions."

"I wouldn't say that I was going to forfeit this position, just that the idea of doing so had presented itself to me, and this alone is a sign that I'm not entirely plussed, quite yet, to be on board for these shenanigans. I will talk to the children again, but I will try to keep a demeanor of professionalism, and not stoop to their level. I thought that this would initially be a way to connect with these children more deeply, but children betray other children, and even if you speak like them and mimic their train of thought, they can still sour in an instant and make a monkey out of you."

"I suggest you change your attitude so it becomes one that the children aren't familiar with, and from this they will be more keen on paying attention to you. Be an unknown factor." The man put his pen back in his pocket. "In either case, I must submit my farewell to you at this time. I have to meet with this woman that's been threatening to kill herself for the past week and a half."

He stepped out of the office and left Mr. Senator to continue his fretting contemplation and mental structuring of brainstorms, charts and graphs.

The office is located in a well-shrubbed part of town that happens to be central to pretty much all of the different shades of culture that pass by in their daily commutes and otherwise.

The office has a brick exterior and the windows present a light blue hue.

"I feel that sometimes, that the children have no obligation towards men, even if they behave well. This sort of proper mannerism, I think, only serves as a means to distract themselves from the reason why they are being so well-mannered in the first place, and this is intolerable. I wish I could set myself up to be by the rules of a pilot's command, and present all of my complicated functions to the children. I would not simplify the objectives to them, but at the same time, I would not allow myself to be distant with them, and I would deeply strive to allow them the chance to understand these objectives with as warm of a disposition as I could muster, and push them through the intimidation of this unknown, complicated wizardry. They would come through with shining colors and be proud examples of the families from which they came from, and while I would no longer be casting my light upon them, I would know that I have encoded my vigor and my assertion of making changes, if only in a small way, into the hearts of each of these young men and women."

Mr. Senator walked around his office to observe the achievements of his name, hung on the walls with borders and textured paper backgrounds. He observed the office toys that he had lined up on his table, each with messages, subtle to him, that he was working towards a great future for any given body that he would decide to work for.

"At the end of the day, I make this notion present to the few and to the many. I make the stark, overriding generalizations that boost up a demographic from their despair and disinclination to achieve their dreams, while I also pinpoint on the specific individuals that need a special means of escalation towards self-achievement, and I would aid them with a firm, but fundamentally encouraging grip. There are many things I must set into place and place into motion and motion into solidity and solidify into constructs and construct into systems and systematically instigate in order for the satisfaction of the peoples around me to be resoundingly heard as a single community of absolute strength and perseverance."

He pretended that he had a mini putt-putt golf course in his office and made the motions of him putting a golfball into a hole, but he shrugged off the attempt to amuse himself and continued mulling on.

"Beseeched be my own family, cast aside by the dogs of my relations and resolved over mere acceptance to the lack of my being there? Ha! I will do no such disinclination to work towards the things that I want to see. I will not press myself against the fuzz of self-defiance; I shall achieve my goals. I will rein over myself, first and foremost, before I even consider reining over anyone else. This madness must stop, and all the mirrors point to the same terminal point that must be reconstructed. This identity has only proved to result in misery over and over again. I infect the shells of each of these projects and leave them to rot in my absence. I am a nomad by all accounts. I am an insect, shedding my skin and leaving the husks as reminders of my likeness to those less keen... but the keen are out there, and they can see my side-stepping and taste-testing as the thing it is, and they can detect me as the infectious agent. The problem is that this cannot, and will not be changed. What must I resolve to, then? It is simple. I must make my infection a medicinal one, and the resulting bounty to actually spread this infection... what I have done so far has not become airborne, it merely only infects. I must become airborne. I must involve myself in the fluidity of my people. I must (he continues for hours)..."

Mr. Senator ranted internally as the cars passed by his office, unaware of the terminal blithering that this man of power was allowing himself to take part in. He knew that he would arrive to no conclusion other than that he was glad to have released such built-up energy, forget the content of his spilling, and rest coolly at the chair in his office, relishing that the sweat on his face has become comfortable, rather than unpleasant.

* * *

Daphne managed to take Scooby's shoes off and rebox them while he was still stress-napping at the edge of the carpeted staircase. Daphne found herself propped up on the sofa again, but this time she managed to turn on the television that was fixed above the fireplace. It flickered on and played through various well-known commercials before setting on the story of a Mexican mouse who was as tall as a human and conned people out of their money.

There he would stand, at the corners of the street, glancing to the left and right, completely mischievous and completely suspicious, but nobody that passed by him seemed to take note or care, and this is where the humor lied in the cartoon.

The mouse would offer to show card tricks to unsuspecting people. They could follow him into the alley where he would sit them down on one side of a wooden table and he would sit himself on the other.

He would get out his deck of cards and ask the unsuspecting person what their favorite card was. The card in question would vary from person to person and this really didn't play much part in the series other than to signify that there would in fact be 52 episodes in total.

They would say their favorite card and the mouse would flip through the deck until it got to that card. The mouse would hold up the card to the person and ask, "This is the one you want?" They would say yes and the mouse would give them the card.

With the rest of the deck the mouse had, he split it in half so there would be about an equal amount of cards for each of his hands. Then, he would take the two smaller fractions of cards close together on the table and he would do one short and violent shuffle.

The card trick in question is that the shuffling simply wouldn't stop. The mouse would place his hands behind his back and the cards would shuffle loudly on their own, violently circulating through the cards without any give.

The person would declare that to be amazing and offer to shake their hand with the mouse, but the mouse would decline their handshake and say, "No need, just keep your card, as a reminder of me."

They would do so, and leave, and the deck of cards would follow them, still shuffling. They would follow the person wherever they went, until eventually it would chase them.

The person would keep running until they made a connection that they were being chased because they had the card that the deck was missing. You would think that it would stop once the person slid the card back into the shuffling deck, but it didn't.

It would bite the fingers of the person, which results in them dropping the card, which results in the deck becoming aggressive, which results in the deck attack of the person, snapping at them and ripping pieces of their clothes off.

They ran away from the deck, biting at them like a malevolent electric razor, until they came back to the mouse and begged of him to stop the shuffling.

The mouse then says his catchphrase: "I will, but for twenty dollars."

Sometimes the person would have the money on them, sometimes they wouldn't and would have to figure out how to get the money back to the mouse, but when the money did get returned to the mouse, he would simply scream "STOP IT" and the deck would fall on the ground as 51-card pickup.

Nobody else in the show ever yells "STOP IT".


	3. Clarification and Touching Up

Left to her own devices, Daphne turned over the clock in the dining room so that the face was not facing out of the wall, but rather into the wall, and this was due to the fact that Daphne believed that the glare from the face of the clock was simply too much and became a distraction when she was trying to eat. She didn't even have to be facing the clock at the table and she could already tell that something was amiss; errant light placement can become quite the nuisance for a little girl like her.

In the placement of the cupboards and the napkins all about the third set of kitchenware, I think it was realized that all of the patterned kitchen cloths had to be set aside in the event that when Scooby wakes up, we will stumble upon them and try to balance them without any of them falling off on his nose. This would be an unusual antic to expect out of Scooby Doo, but in the absence of any spectators, you would be surprised at what some puppies will do.

There was an event that took place a week before the previously written-about events in which Daphne had invited a cast of people over to try out some of her cooking. They were all what she regarded as involved friends, who did manage to help tidy up the messes they made if messes were made and those messes happened to need tidying up. In the event of this, four additional friends walked into her house: John, the giant; Nancy, the widowmaker; Foxin-Lags, the child town supervisor; and Bethelemew, a fragrant woman. This was all tired role playing in the eyes of Daphne, but old friends are old and anything that's old should be treated delicately. They sat themselves down at the dinning room table and found to be particularly distracted by the clock that was clacking out its 120-a-minute gospel.

Daphne arrived at the table with what at first appeared to be freshly-baked apple pie, but upon closer inspection was really mostly ham. They all took slivers of the meal as if they were slicing expensive deli meat, but this was really more playful examination of the execution of the act than really wanting their food to be served that way. Regardless, it became a very tedious, drawn-out dinner in which the meat simply dissolved upon the tongues of her friends; a note of surprise is that all four of her friends forgot to compliment her.

After they decided to call it quits when the entirety of the ham was half-consumed, they all decided to whip out a board game that they had found at a garage sale at some darker part of the neighborhood a few weeks prior to this one-week-ago incident. The board game featured smaller versions of the entire cast of chess pieces, except seven colors of the entire cast were presented to differentiate players, and yes, the entire chess cast was used for this game, although the rules completely surrendered any individuality of mechanisms for how the pieces worked - this was all dictated by dice rolls.

The object of the game was to surface from the water that was presented as a thin piece of paper that was attached to a crank that lowered itself, which as to simulate the ascent of would-be chess pieces floating back up after being released from the ocean floor. The challenge of the game comes in that there are malevolent fish also floating about and want to eat the chess pieces, which results in a loss. The reason that the fish want to eat the chess pieces is that for the most part, their level of the ocean is bereft of color, so anything that stands out in the dark could potentially be a rare meal that would most definitely be worth scoping out for.

The board game itself places a particular focus on such qualities as anticipation, plotting of movement, risk-taking, and the attempt to put every action that the player does not take on that particular game to their advantage. The ocean current may sway characters so that more or less points are added to their dice rolls, lending them more dangerously close to hungry fish than they may have anticipated. If two players bump into each other, they must dice roll to see who bumps whom out of the way farther. Much pleasure can be derived from this game, and one could go much more into depth about the mechanics of the game and why it has stood the test of time as one of the most immersive and mentally challenging games one could indulge in, but that is the function of another story entirely.

Foxin-Lags advised all of the others to meet him in the living room next to the fireplace for a toast, and they all followed suit. Seeing as how these were all indeed still children, despite how unchildlike they might have acted at this point in time, wine was certainly off limits and any inclination to try it was frowned upon by everyone in that circle of friends. Instead, the sparking grape juice was corked open and each had their share in a glass so they could cling the fine china delicately against the other fine china and resolve towards a small celebration of their friendship.

"I believe that as long as I have known you all, I have never been more relieved that this far into it and we are still not at each other's throats." They laughed.

"But, to bring myself back to my point of contention, you have all served me some fine years in my still nubile and enchanting life, and I expect this to be a continuing trend in the years to come, and above all, I wish that I have bestowed the same joys to each of your lives as well."

"That's all fine, Lags, but when are we going to have the cake?"

"Nobody brought any cake, Nancy."

"Well count me out!" Nancy splashes her untouched sparkling juice into the fireplace, putting out the heat and creating a large amount of steam and sizzle.

"You were always a misguided firecracker, Nancy. Daphne, would you mind pouring some more into Nancy's glass? - she's still impeccably bad at making impressions in social situations." John looked at Daphne square in the eyes while saying this, but one could tell there was a small part of bemusement in his posture. Nancy frowned at John.

The glass was poured again, and Foxin-Lags managed to repeat what he had said prior verbatim before Nancy's outburst, and they clinked glasses together, and despite the given formalities of the toast, drank their collective fluids rather ungracefully. It was of the ilk that they would each immediately pretend to be drunk after drinking all of their juice, dropping the glasses on the carpeted floor yet somehow still shattering them. They walked around like little frankenstein monsters, removing pillows from the sofas and love seats and placing them on the ground for them to roll over and nuzzle against their faces, all of this while a stream of giggling was taken place, but clearly without genuine emotion attached to it.

"I'll make my way of merry business and head right out the door!" Bethelemew chirped. "I seem to be in very much pane from the glass that's on the floor!" She marched towards the still-open door leaving dots of blood on the white carpet and inviting the others to join with her through the most coaxing and simultaneously angering gestures.

"Once is plenty but twice is money as I have seemed to left... my obligations in the car, where my real concerns are kept! Now Daphne Dear, I understand that you are a true friend, but time is money and yours is not, so to better things I'll tend!" Foxin-Lags limped over to the still-open door, clearly not enjoying himself.

"You sicken me with your good looks, you sicken me with all my might - and try as I may, and try as I shall, I'll see to it you break tonight. Your hair is already firm in place while mine spills nasty all over the place and the lack of blemishes on your face makes me clench my fists so tight!" Nancy proceeds to spit in Daphne's face; the color of the spit lends you to believe she chews tobacco, but she doesn't. "Hurrah, hurrah to your affairs, barren womb, and vaginal tears! " Nancy proceeded to go up the stairs of the house; you hear a window break.

"To think of me as steady-minded shall leave you, Daphne, much blindsided as I predict my friends of three will leave your well-being much divided. Trust me this, trust in me, trust me that I'll have you be in much distress, backwards-winded, back into an oocyte, thee!" John swipes Daphne's legs under her and she falls on the floor with her bare arm falling on small shards of glass. "Forgive me for the... forgive me for the crumbs..." John says derangedly while darting his eyes all over the broken glass. He scoops some up with his cupped hand and introduces it into his mouth, gnawing exaggeratedly, to which blood starts trickling down his chin. He catches a glance of himself from the reflection of the television screen, "Bleh! Bleehh!", he pretends to be a vampire and holds his arm out over his arm in front of his face like he's acting out of control, and he makes his way to the open door, shifting back and forward the entire way out like a horrormonster.

Immediately upon John leaving, Daphne gets up, shuts the door, locks it, and peeks out of the blinds on the dining room window to find the four of them out there on her driveway, waiting for someone to pick them up.

* * *

"Scooby's going to have a dream now", Scooby thinks as his muzzle still lays unphased at the bottom step of the staircase. He feels his body leave his body and, on two legs, make the slow ascent up the staircase. While the staircase is playing itself to a downwards escalator effect, Scooby knows that with his stride that he will make it to the top eventually, and that it is not, in fact, endless. It was a test of Scooby's patience that was inflicted on him after the rare moment of panic he experienced as he attempted figuring out the quality of his shoes earlier that day. It was in this that he realized he probably should have kept his previous pair on too so that his paws were completely covered, even if this presented the possibility that wearing both at the same time would result in an uneven or unsteady gait.

The carpeted steps managed to get cooler with each step of a paw and each new step pawed upon without ever resulting in a step that hurt to the touch or would feel like it would result in frostbite; just a progressive, painless decline in temperature to remarkable levels. The sensation traveled up Scooby's spine with each step, and send pleasurable shivers up him until at a point he fancied himself to be like a giant hummingbird that was plugged into an outlet. The buzzing became so intense that he couldn't even feel himself walk anymore and he simply became his environment as well, although the body of the puppy continued walking up the stairs. From vibrations came colors, and from colors came patterns, and from patterns came communities of patterns, and from these communities of patterns came bodily systems of creatures that were invisible, and Scooby lived through all of these lives of invisible creatures from birth to death. He felt it best not to retain the information of the previous creature that he was, for he felt that would ruin the sanctity and wonder of the life he had just lived, simulated as it may be.

He countlessly found himself reaching the top of the stairs and simply concluding his existence, but something flung him back to his position on the stairs with the auditory signification of a motor revving up. Two Scoobys on two staircases, three Scoobys on three staircases, eighteen Scoobys on eighteen staircases, four-thousand Scoobys on one staircase; and he could indeed feel all of their steps, and he repeatedly chose to interpret the sensation of it all as pain, for the pleasure had become too great and starting causing an instability of this godly sort of cognition. He felt unbalanced until he alloted himself torture, because torture was the ultimate release from this diamond dustliness he had stumbled upon, but whereas pain and torture become tolerable in the long run, this holiness had no give and no boundary to finish its course at. He knew that violence was an answer, and had to smite others than himself in order to quell the purity of his holiness, but this was in vain as with each time he had harmed another, it had only solidified the conclusion that it was all to support the magnificence that was stumbled upon, and that because the violence inflicted ceased to segment his university, all that violence provided was the reminder that there would be nothing to return to and nothing to be admonished by if he, himself, was the essence of admonishment.

It came to point where, finally, something broke: the total surprise shot out of his deity state. He shot up the stairs with urgent speed as a skeleton, forced into Daphne's bedroom, forced into Daphne's closet, and forced into utter darkness, where something titanic crushed through Scooby's skull with a totality that exceeded death.

* * *

"It gives me a gas to know about all these frequent emergences from the forest, these young campers with their necks all chewed up with ticks, beetles and bumblebees. I guess you would know better if you shot into the forest yourself, Richard. The clippings of toenails on the grass were the first indication to me that these weren't real campers in the slightest. They thought they could just make something fun out of introducing such virginal, pale skin into the wilderness and expecting the campfire songs and tent playfulness to make them through such unconditioned times, but no, the insects win again."

"The insects always win, Tylenol." Richard responded, to which he held up a grasshopper in his hand that he was keeping in his pocket, and then he crushed it in his palm.

"I wonder how many real campers are in this here neighborhood."

"I wouldn't count on there being any. We would simply judge them harshly, and if that wasn't enough, then delusionally." Richard wiped the mess onto his pant leg and sniffed at his palm. "Smells like pesticide."

"You really aren't funny, Richard. You always do this. You always spout off words without thinking about what you're spouting, and then you go ahead and assign some meaning you think is clever behind it. It's the same thing with all of your outbursts."

"What harm does it do if the people I'm around find it clever? My voicebox might have a keener sense of humor than my brain does!" Richard took his hand out of his pocket and moved it downwards.

"No, shut up Richard. That's not the mark of cleverness as much as it is the mark that you're content with whatever vomit comes out of your mouth, which reinforces how lazy you are, which reinforces why your grades are pitiful in comparison to mine."

"This really does smell like pesticide though, smell!" Richard holds up his hand to Tylenol; Tylenol rolls his eyes.

"Damn it, Richard, I was humoring you! I knew what you said was clever and was admiring it but now you just botched it up again because of this half-baked idea that you think I don't understand you."

"We can say we knew what we were going for all we want, but at the end of the day, it just comes to the same conclusion as it always does; that death upsets you!" Richard playfully shoves Tylenol.

"Yes you goof, and now you got the goddamned concept of it on my goddamned clothes!" Tylenol pitifully attempts wiping the insect guts off of his sweater, with legs and antennae dropping on the sidewalk. "I bet you offer the same consideration to the girls of the playground by offering handshakes after you just got out of the portable toilet, looking for dropped change!"

"Yeah, well, at least I didn't drop it purposefully..."

"I'd be commending you, if that was the case, but no, you're just awkward!"

"Better to be awkward than an ingrown hair, like yourself!"

"An ingrown hair can be treated; whatever pathology you have's genetic; a fool of fools with no foreseeable redemption in sight!"

"At least I would have the acknowledgement of responsibility for living with something I couldn't shake off... your condition's preventable and wouldn't have happened if you simply knew better! That, my friend, is much worse!"

"I can at least live with it being my mistake, you fool. You have to live with the reality that your parents made yours!"

Richard didn't respond to this one. "Yes, Richard!" Richard concludes with satisfaction. "That's where it gets you, doesn't it? At fault from conception!"

"Look at that underpants toddler, over there."

Tylenol looks over to where Richard is pointing. The boy who got discharged from the grocery store is trudging down a sidewalk away from them, pulling out his dirty blonde hair and growling ill-conceived, stuttering cussing loudly enough to be heard over from where he is. It doesn't look like the boy has any sort of idea where he's going, just that he is internally agitated to the point of being a drifting grump. If you were close enough to see him up close, you would see that his eyes were red with sucked-in tears, and that his lips were chapped almost to the point of no recognition. The gritting of his teeth was obvious and dramatic from the muscles being flexed from his fat cheeks. His long eyelashes were tangled with one another and twisted, forming small clumps where the ends of the eyelashes would meet. The freckles in his face mixed with the caked dirt that he had rubbed on himself from tantrumly pulling grass out of the grocery store landscaping and hitting it against his face. The dirty blonde hair of which was still unpulled was messy and featured quite the bounty of knots and dandruff. There were marks of dry skin right above his eyebrows that were cracked in and slightly bleeding. His teeth were as yellow as his belly, and his tongue sported an inappropriate amount of white splotches on it, no doubt resulting from his abysmal sense of oral hygiene. His chin was riddled from insignificant stab wounds that he had been likely inflicting on himself, either at school or at home, with a plastic fork, and the area was reddened likely due to infection. His earlobes were scabby from picking at them when he should have been paying all of his attention to his teacher, and it goes without saying that his likely excessive cerumen is likely an off color, likely. His nose was exuding the color of snot that you would expect from a child with constant sinus infections, but shockingly, this was not the case here; instead, this little boy likely snorted around in the baseball field dirt like a little piggy and made an easy home for rat poop and viruses. The sweat that had collected under his shirt, shorts, and underpants for the past three days resulted in the colors of his clothes to be mottled with grease and stink oils from what have you. In addition to the sweat, one could say that were more skidmarks in his undies than there was clean space, and the hardened texture of the fecal poop cloth chaffed at his buttocks. He probably sticks his untrimmed toenails and toes in the swamp for so long that the parasites from the stork poop and all else in the swamp got under his toenails and discolored that which is supposed to be pink and white with green, blue, and brown; I can't comment on the odor because his shoes miraculously cover it up; that or his butt smell simply negates it. His bellybutton has lint in it. His private parts have a film over them because he doesn't bathe. He coughs like an old man and his sputum is the combined color of all the breakfast cereal he overeats. He's not well-learned. He still bites. He's neglected by otherwise responsible caretakers. He doesn't know what he's doing. Kill him.

* * *

Daphne wakes up Scooby with an uncharacteristic hug and greets his opening eyes with an uncharacteristic smile and surprises Scooby with an uncharacteristic warmness of expression - that is all she provides for him.

The new shoes happened to be placed next to the old shoes in a closet, to remind Scooby that he likely needs to buy another pair of the same new shoes in order for the grand effect it's supposed to have to take place upon the puppy, but the puppy is still, in vain, trying to hold onto the strands of the vile dream he had just awoken from.

They watch the television together, still on opposite ends of the sofa, where River Side street in all of its bronzed columns provides a showcase for their famous garage sales, where the wealthy provide discounted items that signify a status of wealth to those who seemed to escape the calculated clutches of high-income life. The less endowed bought from the residents of River Street street like slovenly dogs on their hind legs requiring the bare minimum of dog broth from the involved yet pleasant, obese soup server.

Scooby doesn't exactly remember River Side ever having bronze columns or televised charity of this sort, but he convinced himself that this was due to the lack of purposeful intake that he allowed himself while having his heat-induced panic attack. He must have touched upon hundreds of different streets but he could only pull from a collection of seven or eight that he retained. Scooby slowly pieced together his experience to Daphne, noting that usually his tendency to pretend to get lost usually pans out well for him, but in this instance, it had resulted in a negative reaction in body and spirit, and the stove-surface temperatures of the outdoors definitely did not help him in this case.

"I mean, I usually check the forecast before I go outside anyways, Scooby. Why didn't you do the same? It could have been a blizzard out there too and you would have nothing on to protect yourself."

"If it was a blizzard out, I would have seen it from the window on account of the snow. Did you think out what you said at all, or are you that uninvolved in trying to give me solid advice?"

"The fact remains, Scooby. You should've checked the forecast."

"Really, should I have? It was fine when I walked out and was still fine for a good fifteen minutes afterwards. It suddenly became hot out of the blithering frickin' blue! You know that forecasts can't account for the unpredictable. I was just unlucky, Daphne. I need two pairs of these sneakers, evidently."

Daphne laughs. "Well good, that means I can have MY pair of sneakers back." Scooby cocked his head for the first time in his life.

"Those were your sneakers, Daphne?"

"Yes, Scooby! Don't you remember? When we were kids! I lent them to you because I opted for something more girly for that year's Christmas, and having shed this disregard for my appearance, I thought you could use them better than I do."

"Right, still leaving me short of a pair like the brat you are!"

"Maybe if I had a twin brother..."

"Yeah? Well maybe I'm the next best thing!"

"Oh just shut up, Scooby. You're a good friend but nowhere near that level of family support."

"Says you. Who patched up your wounds after you were bullied by that group of losers who coaxed themselves into your house last week?"

"I did."

"Well, who bought you the things that were necessary to patch you up with? The bandages, the gauze, the masking tape, the electric tape, the-"

"I did."

"Who provided you the idea to use those things?"

"You did, but you didn't take into account that I needed to pull the glass out of my arm before applying those things, so it was a dumb idea of yours that would've been contrary to my health if I heeded it."

"...and it was your idea to buy the glasses, and your idea to make friends with those goons among goons, who learned from you that it's "funny" to pretend to be drunk after drinking juice."

"They certainly provide more excitement than you, Scooby Doo."

"Your warped idea of excitement is no doubt the end result of years of sheltered, unchallenged life. I bet you're going to be eating flies when you're 20."

"Better than being eaten by flies by the time you're 20, dumb dog."

"At least I have a biological upbringing. You're made of some kind of cheap plastic."

"And you're actually arguing with a piece of plastic?"

"Yeah... well... Raphne...(!)"

Daphne giggled out loud. "Haha, what!? What did you call me?"

Scooby tried disregarding her right then in there, but her sadistic childish curiosity sunk underneath him with unignorable alkalinity. Daphne stood over the puppy menacingly on the sofa. "Careful there, bud. Let's not let ol' Daphne give you a speech disorder this early on in your development!"

"Knock it off, you goof. I just got out of a perpetual heatstroke. Don't expect me all 100% there."

"Oh, but Scooby.." Daphne put on a face of ingenuine, exaggerated concern. "I don't expect anything out of you... that's what makes you so fun to be around!" Daphne facetious tone of voice was irking Scooby, and he continued to try watching the television. Daphne's face was right up next to Scooby's, with nose practically touching side of face.

"And when you're the most fun to be around... that's when you try to ignore me, like you are right now! All embarrassed and soft on the inside... A marvel to have a talking puppy so eloquently communicate with the people around him, and yet can't even get the pronunciation of his best friend's name right!"

"Stop it."

"Am I making you feel small, Scooby Doo? Am I shriveling that proud doggy tail of yours?"

"Stop it, Daphne..."

"What's next? Rooby?"

"Stop i-"

"Rooby Doo?"

"STO-"

"RAPHNE, REDDY, RELMA ROO"

"STOP IT"

"ROOOBY DOOOBY D"

Scooby bites Daphne's face.

* * *

The sea rolled over itself like thousands of grooves on a potato chip magnified by the thousands, and the fish within the grooves managed to convince the fisherman that whatever movements they were doing were choreographed and synchronized. The skin of the man in the motor boat was at this point the same color as the sea that was surrounding him, and the wooziness of his being encompassed every slight movement he dared make, triggering him to vomit the seawater that he had swallowed in vain in nourishment only minutes before. The sun beat down on his body hard like piping hot water trying to rid of a stain on dirty dishes. He had to shield himself, but he also had to move around; he had to avert his eyes from the sun, but he needed to stare at it for periods to make sure that he stayed awake and didn't slip out of his alertness. He pawed at the water in desperation, trying to scoop out anything but water to bring to his mouth, but nothing invited themselves that willingly.

"I wish that this boat was wooden, so I could eat it."

The metallic, almost tinny construction of the boat he was on soaked up all the heat from the sun and constantly stung him; this, combined with the saltwater that he was covered in was slowly mummifying him. He starting punching around at the air around him, painful movements; anything to take his mind off of his hunger and discomfort and fear. He rolled around in the boat, tugging at his clothes and his hair. He jumped into the seawater and floated back up and crawled back into the boat, anything to stay awake.

He perforated his arms with his fishing hook so he could provide himself with any other sensation than the severe saline pruritus. This, at this dire stage, he categorized as entertainment. He snapped his fishing rod in half and gnawing veraciously at the splinters of wood. His teeth didn't seem to have the constitution they used to prior to him getting caught up in this predicament, so they loosened and bled over the wood. "Ah, God!"

He soaked the wood in the seawater in an abysmal attempt to soften it up for consumption, and then he shakingly put it back to his mouth, smacking his lips relentlessly and biting into the wet wood, unmitigated by the water. Some of his teeth fell out. "Ah, God!"

He wadded up whatever fishing line was left into an olive shape and put it in his mouth and attempted swallowing it, but there was not enough moisture in his GI tract to let the material pass. It stopped half way down his throat. He hacked and coughed and dry heaved.

He started stumbling around on the boat, shaking it, swaying it left and right. He took the tacklebox he brought with him and slammed it against his forehead, somehow breaking it into two pieces in his desperation. He fell down on his back but immediately got back up.

He looked around on his boat, despising everything that was in it, tossing it into the water without regard. At this point he started growling.

He grabbed the sides of his boat and started shaking it back and forth. He started shaking his head violently back and forth, injuring his neck tissue. He capsized the boat and it sunk into the sea.

With his head sticking out of the water, he shook his head at the sky with his tongue sticking out as his body lost all of its strength. He put his tongue in his mouth. "Ah, God!" He stuck his tongue back out and gurgled. He put his tongue in his mouth. "Ah, God!" He stuck his tongue back out and gurgled.


	4. Exposition III

There were lots of ribbons that were in Elisa's head, but this was more due to the fact that there were lots of ribbons around than that she really needed to put this in her hair. It took a bit of sunlight to get the colors out from the straw that was her hair, but when they did, it seemed like it was wrapping up small bundles of wet spaghetti. There was a ladder propped up against the side of her house and she did climb up it frequently and she did get up on her roof frequently and she did jump on this roof frequently. You could sort of have the house you're supposed to be living in function as just another platform for your make-believe and your non-make-believe fun, somewhat like it's just an addition to a park or playground, and this is the sort of advantage that Elisa took from it. Let's keep in mind that the house is still completely dark on the inside.

Some of the boys of that part of the neighborhood had been working on this project involving a streetlight for a while, where they would carve ridges along the side of it slowly over the course of weeks. They would be able to give themselves slots to put their handing and footing on, and they could simply keep carving upwards until it could be that, if you were a small child, you would be able to climb all the way up the streetlight. To pair Elisa's ribbons to something else that was happening in the general area, you could prove your worth as a kid if you could hang a ribbon over the top of the streetlight without chickening out. Adults couldn't do this.

Her stomach started to hurt, so off she peeled one of the tiles from the top of the roof of her house and she took out some unpackaged beef jerky and started to eat it. The inside of her house knocked, and opened the door, to reveal the pale father, squinting at the bright day. He looked at his watch for a while, and then started ringing his own doorbell slowly, one ring per 15 seconds, which caused the birds in the trees around him to fly out from where they were every single time he pressed it. While Elisa wouldn't be able to hear the doorbell with her selective hearing, she certainly couldn't ignore the programmed taking off of frightened birds, and as such, she knew that she needed to go inside. She climbed back down the ladder, leaving the jerky tile sticking up and walked over to her father.

He looked over at her with puffy, half-alert eyes. "Did you enjoy your day outside?"

"Yes, I got to see Scooby Doo." Her father glanced over the opposite way momentarily.

"Did you know that Scooby Doo doesn't have a home? He's a freeloader."

"Yes, but he's a puppy..."

"Then he should go to the pound. Elisa, I don't want you to think for a second that his sort of life has any sort of glamor to it."

"But he's a friend!"

"Yeah? Well, my roof's better. Now come inside." Her father showed her the way inside, even though she knew how to get inside. You might think this is because he wanted to make the point that she needs to go inside promptly, but it really is that he thinks she doesn't remember how to get in.

The door is closed and they're both inside. Both the dolly and the beachball are still outside. The lights are still off inside.

How long have Elisa and Scooby known each other? I'd say about six months. Her father is right in saying that Scooby doesn't really have a household that's properly his, but rather he assigns a new place to where he will still be welcome, with the current case of this being Daphne's house. Elisa did happenstance see Scooby Doo walk on her sidewalk quite often during the week, and that there was nobody to provide a leash for him yet he had such a keen idea of where he was going and, most strikingly, that he managed to stay on the sidewalk without careening over to the grass, she decided to catch his attention one day and yes they became friends in a short period of time.

Elisa knows where Scooby goes for groceries quite frequently, but she does not know how Scooby even gets money; he's unemployed, so it's possible that he steals from those that don't pay attention. It feels like there's caterpillars crawling around in Scooby's temples when he realizes that he has no money, so something has to be done. Unfortunately, that something's not known yet. Some days when he's walking over Elisa's way, he drags his paws on the ground, and pays false attention to the sidewalk, and doesn't respond to Elisa saying hello, so from this point of understanding we have to think that Scooby simply has no money on him.

What does Scooby buy at the grocery store? He has the money to do so, but he never ends up buying food.

This is because Elisa stores food up in her roof. Out of some sort of arrangement with the father and the daughter, she is allowed outside for a good portion of the day, and he prefers to stay indoors by himself, so he goes outside at night when Elisa sleeps and installs nonperishable food items underneath the tiles of the roof. He sets everything up for her daughter until the sun starts to come out, and then they switch spots. She goes outside to play, and he goes inside to sleep. When Scooby comes around, and because of the father's attempt to overfeed his daughter, Scooby is provided with mealsworth of it by Elisa, and he in return usually buys Elisa toys over at the grocery store, hence the dolly and the beachball. There are some days where he either doesn't respond or simply doesn't show up, so either he doesn't eat during those days or someone offers him food elsewhere.

There are many hidden things around in the neighborhood. Certain sections of the sidewalk open up to reveal large reservoirs of oil. Certain sections of the sidewalk open up to reveal a storage space for candlesticks. While the layout and logic of providing particular items to the local residents doesn't follow anything that you'd know unless you had lived there for a while and mingled enough with the local residents to figure out where all of these town-funded secrets are provided for you. There is no need for employment if you're part of the scene and know where the help is tucked away. Some say that the dirt in the grass is full of nonnative spiders that are decimating the bug population, courtesy of the town provider.

The school around here is pretty significant, and harbors students from the age of 3 to the age of 12 and they are all taught well, but the things that they are taught all reference back into the town that they live in, so all the math problems are word problems, with no tendency to tackle the abstract portion of it, and will refer to such things as how one would one determine the circumference of the town's clocktower face, and the length of the hands, and the decibels of the chiming it produces. This clockwater does not gleam harshly, and it only makes a tock every 15 seconds.

I found nothing else to note about the town for the moment, but Mr. Senator was walking over to the grocery store that Scooby Doo frequents to perhaps get some more kitchen clothware to dab at his face with. His dark suit, not fastened on him well, was covered in sweat and he had to stick his handkerchief in his mouth when he was buying the set of three kitchen cloth pieces, for he did not want the package to slip from his wet hand onto the floor. The cashier looked at him, not so much concerned as passively observant as he fumbled with the cloth with his thick fingers and had the old handkerchief hanging out of his clenched teeth.

"Yeah, are those things supposed to be good?" Mr. Senator was growled as he glared at the mini shelves of gum.

"Good for what? I don't think they'll taste quite as good as what you've got with you right now." Cashier laughed.

"I dip it in cherry juice every night. Can we please stop talking about my handkerchief and just get me out of here?" Mr. Senator can't stop getting distracted by the gum.

"Did you want some gum too, sir?"

"I-i-i don't want any gum, I just wanted to make sure you were stocked up."

"This checkout station we are, but you might want to check all the others just to be sure." Cashier laughed.

"Give me a break." Mr. Senator handed over the 3.98 for the three-set of clothware for the kitchen and left the building with irritated body language and sharp glances to purposeless points of space, indicating he was paranoid. Outsiders looking in found his behavior to be incredibly suspicious since he dropped the plastic bag that his purchase was in, stuffed it into one of his inside pockets, and guarded it for dear life while passing people on the street. The sweat build up under the crevices of his eyes in temporary puddles that poured down his face constantly, leaving trails of moisture on the sidewalk whenever he squinted his eyes.

A couple of animals took note of his behavior as well. Birds that were chirping and swirling around in the air did set themselves back on the branches to witness his under-pressure gait and the deep musk that was emanating out of his clothes; it did not smell like a human being, but the birds had to leave their perch on account of something else. The flies circled around him, but at a distance, for not a single one of them touched him, and if any person passed on his way, a couple of the flies would immediately follow that person instead, aggressively. Squirrels rubbed against his legs, coming down from trees, when he got close to his office.

He closed the door behind him, took off his shoes, and jumped into a cold bathtub full of water that he had prepared prior to leaving, clothes and all. He ripped the packaging, soaked the kitchenware cloth pieces, all three of them, and placed them over his face. They slid off his face, again and again, until he got fed up and cut off his nose with a knife that was also in his inside pockets. He placed the wet cloth pieces back on his face, with blood being soaked into them, while his freed nose floated in the bathtub water.

* * *

That grumpy kid from earlier slid down the incline of the bridge that Scooby crossed and went into the sewer. We walked quite a ways through it, with the smoky fecal fragrances fitting together right in with his own. The slick walls of the sewer tunnel practically slid him down to where he needed to go, which was a platform of dry concrete that was elevated from the sewer current. Here, he sprawled his body on it and babbled to himself for the next couple of hours, with the ceiling space above him dripping with collected condensation and sediment oils on his face; the closest thing he has had to a shower in what could be a month. The dripping escalated and soaked his entire body, until it was practically a fountain that splashed down him. This medicinal bathing process slicked his hair down, all of his odors dissipated, washed away his clothes, and replaced it with a teal goop that covered him like a hooded bodysuit.

He flung this goop about because it was against his wishes, but it did solidify on him and he did learn to accept it. He laid his back on the sewer current and let it take him through a very long distance, with subtle and soft careening turns and portions where the current led him down with the speed of a car on the highway. Despite this being sewage water, it was treated to look remarkably clear and dare I say crisp, but this did not detract from how dangerous the composition of the water was. The tunnel colors changed from the grey concrete from the start to a rusted brush paint to a foily golden structure and switched between these three over and over. The effect was somewhat like that of a bobsled.

He had no particular destination to arrive at, because it was that the sewer was simply traveling him around in a circle, but the composition of his goop started to glow like it was molten, and by the point in time the goop had completely covered his face. The chubbiness of the kid pre-goop had now increased in height and slendered down into a generic humanoid shape, and eventually, into quite a lengthy, nonhumanoid shape. The current of the sewer draw him out so long that eventually he just appeared to be a large colony of red moss that was being carried along the path, and you could see a gigantic amount of mites crawling about it. From this point, eggs started percolating from the moss and floating up into the air, bloated to the size of peanuts, and burst in the air with the sounds of firecrackers. The crackling got louder and more commonplace as the moss traveled faster and faster through the sewer, until eventually the water itself caught on fire and the sewer was reduced to a magnificent hot tunnel of fire that chased itself down in a pointless race.

This process generated an intense amount of light, with the entire ring-shaped construction of the sewer tunnel glowing bright white, and it goes without saying that any sort of vermin that happened to be in the sewer at that time were cleansed into particles. Warp noises gathered in speed and pitch, until it finally gave, and the intense light petered out into darkness, with an effect that was akin to what happens when you lose in a game of snake. The sewer became completely dark, and barren of water and waste, but footsteps could be heard walking along the path of it, now frigid and without temperature. The sound of hands grabbing onto the rungs of a ladder and climbing up was rewarded with the sound of a section of sidewalk being pushed out from underneath it and Red Herring crawling out of the sewer covered in red moss that functioned as pajamas.

He glanced across the neighborhood, as he was the only surveillance, and looked at the green, water-damaged sidings of houses. Red Herring tested out his capacity to jog, and he did jog well, as the moss covering his feet provided a superior amount of comfort and assistance in his gait to the shoes he had worn prior to his transformation (in case you didn't reach the same conclusion as I did about how the grumpy kid of the past description looked, it was like The Kid that beat a certain Santa Claus at checkers); he ran quite fast, with an almost military discipline of his running. He witnessed the birds of the neighborhood in their jungle inappropriateness, and they followed him; even the wind seemed to carry along with Red Herring's will.

He took a detour into the town park and walked down the path in all of its windiness. A first person perspective forced itself into being paid attention to, and you could see the stubby, boyish arms of Red Herring push bicyclists coming in the opposite direction off of their bikes. You could see the arm of Red Herring grab at a bird in mid air, squeezing it violently with one hand, then passing it to the other hand and decompressing it and ridding the bird of injury, and promptly releasing it. He did this same sort of ritual to a frog, a bumblebee, a toad, and a garter snake. Out of all these animals, the garter snake made the loudest noise in response to the pain it received.

Red Herring climbed up a palm tree and got to the top of it, only to look up and see the bottom of another palm tree waiting to be climbed upon, which he did, and when he got to the top of this one, he had actually climbed back up to the ground of the park. He simply took this as a nice detour and continued back on the path.

He spread his hands and held them out in front of him, and was able to collect hundreds upon hundreds of mosquitos without any of them taking bites. He saw that there was a little girl holding a balloon in the park, so he flexed his biceps muscles and the mosquitos shot out at the balloon, popping it. Red Herring ran past the girl, but you could hear her start to cry, with the sound of her crying waning as he continued down the trail. He run straight into a puddle of mud, and this coating over his red moss on his feet became his shoes. He ran through a sheet of cobwebs being suspended by two trees, and these became his pants and t-shirt. He somersaulted through a field of clover and this became his vest.

Red Herring ran out of the park and cooled off next to a streetlight. Wiping the sweat from his brow, he saw that there were indentations on the streetlight to place his feet and hands on, and so he climbed up to the of the streetlight, sat upon it, and for the first time ever gave his signature bully chuckle. Most of the remaining moss had slithered up and became his hair color by this point, but there was still a strip of the stuff that was placed on the back of his neck. He peeled this off, hung it across the top of the streetlight like a ribbon, and fastened it. This would result in the birth of a million rumors.

* * *

Daphne applied a white powder upon her face to mask the bite marks that spoiled her plastic-molded visage, but it was no usage, the bite marks shone out clear as day, and this offended her deeply. Scooby, muzzled on the couch, kept an open ear to the tinkering-in-vain that Daphne was doing to herself in the upstairs bathroom, and closed his eyes in amusement. Powders, pastes, and plasters could not hide the attack scars the beast in puppy's clothing inflicted upon her in due retaliation, so she put on a mask of Velma's face.

The mask in question was a creation of the actual Velma Dinkley from years back, the product of one of her research computers, as Velma wanted to get an idea of how she would look many years down the road, and the likeness was uncanny to that of the original Scooby Doo series Velma face. Daphne fixed Velma's face on her face and, satisfied that while not perfect, it hid the damage, she walked down the stairs guessing where she had to place her feet. Stumbling happened, but no actual falling.

She poured herself a bowl of cereal and poured milk on it and put a spoon in it and sat down next to Scooby, and neither of them could see. Scooby's eyes were closed because he didn't want to look, and Velma's eyes were closed because she couldn't see anyways.

"I couldn't get rid of the marks, Scooby. You got me good, and I am sort of surprised at how carried away I got."

"You snap like this all the time, Daphne. You should be surprised that I gave you fair punishment this time. I think that after all of this time, you still don't understand the concept of deserved pain."

"Really, I figured that all of it was deserved."

The fuzzy static of the TV provided the bare minimum of what could qualify as an optical illusion, but the actual static noise was a more engaging detail, as it paused and resumed in a way that mimicked frantic morse code, or perhaps the urgent cautioning of a snake to a group of uninvolved baboons. This made Daphne laugh. This made Scooby do nothing.

"Do we get many snakes around here? You know, besides you?" Scooby temporarily found Daphne's laughter unpleasant.

"Yes the park has millions of garter snakes minding their own business. Some of the park rangers stuffed them in their mouths and pretended that they were spaghetti strands or something, but were very adamant about cautioning the people they were showing the park to not to attempt what they were doing."

"This whole town's full of attention seeking."

"Well, the town needs funding."

"No, it doesn't. It needs a spanking from a mother that actually has aspirations for her children."

"What are you trying to say, Scooby? You think I'm not attended to properly? I quite like it like this."

"I wasn't thinking that, but yes, clarify why you've had no supervision for the last six months. I didn't ask because I liked it too, but this is getting hard to believe at this point."

"Well, I'm rich. I don't have t-"

"Aren't you supposed to have a butler? Where's the butler?"

"He comes around once a week to drop off food and other necessities. He'll be here tomorrow, in case you don't believe me. Anyways, the parents are in what is called a combat web, and they have been fighting for six months straight in there. I'm not sure if they're going to return anytime soon."

"Oh, so they're part of the Spider club."

"Don't call it that! I'm not sure why they agreed to go there, but ever since then it's been spider noises, walking towards each other menacingly, and scratching each other with their fingernails. They patch the wounds up with spiderweb. They actually put their speaker phone on three months ago so I could hear the process, and that's the last time I've talked to them."

"Idiots. Absolute morons."

The fuzz of the TV gave way to a puppeteer having a puppet bounce around on his knee as the puppet pointed in various directions, with the directions of his pointing changing each time the puppeteer tapped his foot, bouncing the puppet. As this was going on, the puppeteer looks at the camera from time to time and grins, like he wants to be sure that the viewers are having a fun time watching him do this on his porch and the pet raven on a perch next to him, providing much-needed comedic relief.

Scooby opens his eyes and looks at the TV when he hears the raven caw. "You have to be rich to get into that club anyways, and all it does it make you psychotic for a year and then you gain nothing from it. It's pure idiotic indulgence from people that aren't happy with what they have."

"It's supposed to make you live 20 years longer after completing it, and they attend to make me attend it when I get old enough."

"I hear that people hire assassinators to kill off Spider club alumni so the entire effort turns into a giant waste."

"No you haven't."

"Well, that would certainly make it even dumber."

"It's just like getting your first car, or having your first child... for people of our stature. Just about everyone on River Side has gone through this, which is why you see such sprightly old people in their neck of the woods. It's just the way things are for the top rung of Coolsville residents."

The crow flies off the perch and attempts to steal the puppet from the puppeteer, but he grabs it by the wings and fastens the strings of the puppet on it, placing the proper puppet on the perch, and does the same thing with the crow, but with every fifth bounce, the raven caws in defiance. The puppet, unstringed, simply sits there slumped and looking down at the ground, but a voice actor provides weeping sounds for the puppet until the puppeteer switches them again.

"Is this show funded by your people or something, Daphne?"

"I have no idea what this is." The puppeteer stands up, takes a bow, and vomits blood.

"Yeah, turn it off." The television turns off.

* * *

Red Herring takes the dolly that was laying on the lawn of Elisa's and pockets it, walking down over back to the grocery store.

He goes into the store and sees the Cashier that refused him the sneakers he wanted.

"Yes? How can I help you?" Cashier tries to discern the stranger.

Red Herring says in his squeaky voice, "Yeah, uh, I would like to request a refund." He slams the head of the dolly up the Cashier's nose, who then proceeds to fall down on her back, writhing in confusion. "How could this be, how could this be?"

Red Herring notices the sneakers on her feet are the ones that her son is supposed to be wearing. "Well well, little (actually hefty) lady, might as well borrow what I can't afford, shall we?" He slips the sneakers off and ties the shoestrings together to form a necklace, which he places around his neck, so that sneakers dangle over his chest. He takes a popsicle from the freezer and sticks it in his mouth, he doesn't pay for the popsicle, and he leaves the grocery store.

The Cashier groans and grasps the body of the dolly with body of her hands without pulling it out. "Scooby Doo, how could you?"

* * *

Scooby starts barking at Daphne's Velma face being plastered over her own, to which Daphne yells "WHAT?" back over and over again, trying to calm down Scooby, shaking her hands at him and pushing him away so that he doesn't bite again.

"This is for the best, Scooby! I can't live with myself looking like I'm deformed!"

"That's going to heal in a week, max! Take that goddamned thing off your face!"

"Why is this upsetting you? It's just some more plastic. You don't have a problem with me, so why should you have a problem with this?"

"Because it looks ugly on you, Daphne! Vile, hideous, disgusting! You wouldn't stoop this low to hide your face. It goes against you maintaining your beauty. You could make bite marks on your face work. This is just low, Daphne!"

"What on earth do you have against Velma! Scooby!"

Scooby growls and stalks over towards Daphne. "I don't have to tolerate you putting the reminder of a long-lost friend on you in order to make you feel better about yourself!"

"It's my house, don't you forget Scooby! I can do whatever I want!"

"Take the damn mask off."

The lights in the house go out. A loud commotion is heard, with snarling, hair pulling, the jangling of a collar, the thudding of a body against cushions, the kicking of a wooden cabinet, a doorstop buzzing harshly, silverware spilling, a coffee grinder going off, and the dripping of a sink.

A ghostly rendition of Velma's voice: Scoooooobyy

The microwave turns on, cooking nothing, but the light from inside it provides clearer insight into the struggle between Daphne and Scooby. Daphne has Scooby pinned against a wall with her hands around his neck, with the dog barking at her continuously with no variation of volume or knowledge. She slaps him. He kicks her.

A ghostly rendition of Velma's voice with her face briefly appearing in the microwave light: Scoooooobyy

"Let it go, dog. It's my choice to do this. You have no control over my life. If this will make me feel better, then I have every right to pursue it without you constantly ridiculing me. Deal with this!"

"I won't let you tarnish the life of someone we used to hang out with. I won't let you go by doing this to yourself, no matter how much it distracts you from the injury on your face. This must end before it starts, Daphne."

"Nothing was started! I just put a mask on my face. It doesn't even look like the Velma we knew! How about you just pretend it's some old lady that bears no relation to either of us and call it quits."

"I refuse you let you lie to yourself!" Scooby releases himself out of Daphne's grasp by force and snatches the mask off of her face with his teeth. He then arches back, "Spoiled brat!", and then flings it right into microwave.

A ghostly rendition of Velma's voice with her face appearing in the microwave light bored out of her mind: Scooooooby-

The mask of Velma's face flies right into the reflection of the ghost of Velma's face and shorts out of the microwave. All the lights turn back on in the house, and some unstable thumping noises happen within the microwave, with a dark, muddy glob banging around the sides of the microwave, accruing mass until the entirely of the microwave is full, finally forcing open and spilling hundreds of gallons of sludge out into the kitchen, and along with it, a sludge-covered body of Velma Dinkley.

Scooby and Daphne grab both of the body's shoulders and drag her over to the backyard and hose her off. Is it not quite the older Velma of the mask, and not quite the child Velma they used to know, but a teenager Dinkley with the same plastic mold no defect face that Daphne used to have. Despite cleaning her off and repeated attempts to wake her up, the body is unresponsive and simply lies there on the grass as Scooby and Daphne survey it.

"There's no place for her inside."

"Of course there is, Daphne."

"How do we even know it's her?"

"It's not her, I can tell... but I don't want this thing outside where the neighbors can peek at it. You need to put this in your closet."


	5. Proper Story I

"My closet, of all the places."

They shove the body back into the house, stumbling around with her weight, swaying back and forth and running into counters, into the backyard door, and puppy paws skittering around on the kitchen tile like ice and Daphne's slippers providing enough tract to allow neither of them to fall. However, this dummy of Velma does have glasses on, and the swaying of the helping child and dog causes the glasses to drop on the floor, clacking very loudly.

The dynamics of weight distribution in this body were making it difficult to get it anywhere that was desired, and they had take a rest when they got from the kitchen to the hallway that housed the bathroom on one side and the laundry room on the other side before entering the dining room. Dinkley's eyes squint vacantly while the two children trying catching their breath and their composure.

"Why is this thing so damned hard to maneuver around? It's like we're pushing it towards something that's the same polarity as it..." Scooby pants these words, sitting next to Velma.

"I suggest we just drag the damned thing." Daphne got up and went into the laundry room and ruffled around in cabinets, from Scooby's ears, until she came back with a length of rope, which they tied around Velma's left ankle, and they proceeded to both pulling her where they wanted to take her. The static electricity in the carpet of the dining room crackled underneath Velma's back, with tiny slivers of white smoke reaching to the ceiling without anything actually catching on fire. "She stinks," with Scooby averting his winced nose.

They get to the tiled entrance, and they pass the body along the remaining puddle of water that Scooby's bag had left in the rain, and it shocked both Scooby and Daphne. They yelled and dropped the rope. Tiny arcs of blue electricity blinked in and out of the body. Scooby cussed.

They got some electrical tape from the bathroom and fastened a handle over the part they were supposed to carry, and proceeding to slowly drag the lifeless body up the stairs. With each step they took up, Velma's head thudded against the stair that met her body there, with the first time the tiniest amount of air that could constitute as a laugh passed through Daphne's lips. The head thudded again on the next step, and she let out a small giggle - and again, and she started giggling, and each step got Daphne going more and more until she was in hysterics and could not shut herself up.

"Would you stop, Daphne?"

"She's..." Daphne has trouble catching her breath. "She's not saying 'Ow.'... she's..." Daphne can't contain herself and drops her share of the handling of the rope while she tops over in tears. Scooby doesn't have the strength to keep Velma within his control and slides out of his grip, Velma's body sliding down the stairs and stopping with her stockings and shoes pointing at the two.

"Snap out of it!" Scooby exasperates as Daphne cries the humor of the situation to herself without any sign of ceasing. "We're going to have to do this again, now hurry up!" Scooby goes back down the stairs while Daphne slowly follows, wiping the wetness off her face.

They pull her up again, same scenario happens. The head thuds against the stairs unpleasantly and the body doesn't react, and Daphne again loses her composure, taking off her headband and biting into it to try to keep herself together, but this again fails again... this time both Scooby and Daphne drop the rope in their hands for the body to slip back down to the entrance floor. Both instances, the children were 3/4ths-way up the stairs and the body was halfway up the stairs.

"I'm sorry, Scooby. She just looks so BORED!" Daphne has her head resting on her knees, trying to find some sort of serious peace and not making any progress. "Are we going to have to tie the rope around her neck? That might start making me laugh..." Scooby examines the situation with frustration.

Daphne unfastens the rope from her ankle and ties it around the neck tightly. Velma's cheeks get slightly puffier as a result of this, but the children don't take heed.

"Alright, let's do this." They pull the body up again with the children facing upstairs, and while not quite as funny this time, the act itself has gotten harder. It's as though the body has gained weight and the struggle is sweat-inducing to both parties. The feet fall against the stairs without much noise.

"What is with this girl?" They manage to almost reach the top of the stairs when the weight from the pull just disappears. Concerned, they look back and see that the body has slid back down the stairs with the head missing. The freakiness of the situation accentuates the silence of the empty house.

"How tight did you tie that, Daphne!?" "It was loosely tied! There was no way that could've happened! This can't be a real body!" They worriedly clamored to one another until out of their peripheral vision they saw the head at the top of the stairs start tumbling down the stairs, passing the children; Scooby shrieks "Ah, God!"; and smashes against the entrance door, cracking it in. The head and body are still intact, no bleeding.

After staring down the stairs at the overall picture for a few minutes without making any sort of decision, they reluctantly walk back down the stairs, the stillness of the house emerging as a sinister reminder due to the fact that they couldn't quite process what they were even trying to do.

Scooby tries lifting the head and can only seem to lift it up a foot off the ground, with the steadiness of his back fighting it, a few seconds before dropping it back on the ground. "Hell. It's just as heavy as the body. I need to get away from this for a second."

They set themselves on the living room couch and didn't say a word, and looked for the therapy that comes from doing nothing and letting things sink in, but this didn't arrive to either of them, and they felt pressured to do anything more.

"Well?" Daphne's gaze is fixed in the direction of the fireplace but not on it.

"I don't think we should use the rope anymore. We need to get that head up there before it pulls any more changes... This all needs to go somewhere we don't have to deal with it."

They proceed back to the entrance and both get a grasp on the head and struggle to carry it with them versus the narrow staircase, like a nonsensical bowling ball. The impeccably smooth skin makes the head very hard to keep in their balance with, with Scooby digging his claws into the head in order to have any sort of firm grasp. The bottom of the severed neck is just as smooth as the rest of it, covered in flesh, showing no indication that it had been decapitated from the body. The hair felt extremely moisturized.

They get to the second floor and see that the door to Daphne's room has been shut; it has been a couple weeks since she has managed to actually go up the stairs to check up on any of the household that was up there. The carpet felt conditioned and moist in its inherent lavender hidden in tan, and the useless railings at the top of the house were featured in the same type of wood that you found downstairs with the blinds and the table. there were about five doors upstairs; a bathroom, a closet, and three bedrooms. They took a right, facing downstairs, and curved around, placed the head on the ground, leaving it temporarily as they opened the bedroom door, that seemed like a draft had adhesed itself to the inside and glued-resistance to the door took the power of two to pry open. Meanwhile, the head rolled itself away towards the stairs...

"Grab it!" They pounced upon the head and contained it, with the movement stopping as soon as they intervened. Scooby cussed and growled at the head, and they walked over back to the door, which was just on its merry way to shutting again, but Scooby stopped it from closing with his foot. It was painful, but not disabling, and they creaked it back open, against its resistance, and slowly carried the burden inside a room that smelled like the toys of little girls.

Draped in a wallpaper that evoked the princesses of castles that Daphne had placed into her young adventures, and the floral ceiling fan, and the beanbags - all these indications of a younger Daphne, which also clashed with tossed about make up, magazines, craft paper, cotton balls, and discarded clothes, and broken glass from a shattered window, all marked obstacles for them to weave around carefully, in the dim light they had, that grew dimmer as the door shut itself without them, and the draft brought them nearly shivering, with the lack of sound outside matching the lack of sound inside the house, sterile.

You couldn't see the moon outside from where they were. They made their way, again, slowly, towards the fortunately open closet door, which was walk-in, and was quite long for a child's walk-in, extending 12 feet inwards, and they got into a position inside of it where they could, as comfortably as they could, set down the head.

"Well? Come on, let's park this thing down already!" Daphne shouted, and the ear of the head wiggled a bit, and then fell off as though gravity made an exception to it, and it thumped down on Daphne's foot with a crack. She yelped in pain. Scooby dropped the head over to the side and rushed a Daphne, having to hop on one foot, out of her room. It was much easier to get out than it was to get in.

* * *

Daphne seethed as Scooby tried to find a nonpainful way to support her bare reddened foot. They were in the downstairs bathroom, and Scooby brought cushioning from the living room to prop Daphne's foot as she, more in disbelief than in pain, although significant, displayed her discomfort in nodding off pre-syncope and returning back, exhausting herself.

"Calm down, Daphne. I need to fasten this." Scooby wrapped up her foot in a way that he believed would promote the evenness of it as much as possible, just in case that that ear had effectively broken bones, until it was tightly wound, foot shaking. "It's fine, it's fine!" she insisted imploringly as she could feel the rough misalignment of the insides of her foot rubbing roughly, rough surface against rough surface, in grinding pain.

Scooby had Daphne lead herself back over to the floor of the living room, turned the fireplace on, propped up her head with cushioning, and had her foot facing the fireplace in an attempt for some sort of therapeutic warmth. Scooby handed her the untouched bowl of cereal she had poured herself before and reassured her to stay there now while he tried to come up with a better solution. All she wants to do is eat and not be in pain, at the moment, so she gives no direct response.

Scooby gets both of the pairs of sneakers on his feet, maybe to provide himself with some sort of reassurance that he can get this done as quickly as possible. He wraps his prehensile tail around the right arm of Velma, and starts pulling up the stairs. He looks back and, just as he feared, it was merely the arm he was puling back up, completely dense and unwilling and tearing against Scooby's hold on the stairs. The sneakers give strong traction to the carpet he's going up, and this and this alone is what managed to give Scooby the help to get the arm all the way up the stairs; this took 3, shivering minutes.

Scooby's squashing upstairs steps soaked into his sneakers, with the shampoo wetness tingling against his paw fur, and he dragged the arm with him to the door, struggling, as he forced the door back open, and the girly smell flew back into Scooby's nose like someone opening a trashcan. The sound of the fireplace crackling downstairs was just as audible up here as it was down there.

He dragged the arm across the room, feeling that it's picking up the glass and crumbled foundation on the carpet. The head is now at the entrance of the closet door as opposed to a few feet in, and he props up the arm so it holds the head in place. He doesn't see the ear in sight, looks behind him, and sees it slowly sliding towards the exit to the room. He paws it back into the closet and closes the door. As he walks out of the room, he hears the wood of the door groaning, indicating that weight is being put against it.

He walks back down, and performs the same maneuver with the right leg, with it popping out of the body and him dragging it slowly up the stairs. As he makes his way back towards the door, he notices that the ear is slipping out into the main second floor area again through the space that's under the door. Agitated, he drops the foot to stop the ear, but realizes he made a mistake as the ear stops, as the floor behind him groans with additional weight being introduced. He goes back to the leg and attempts to lift up the shoe, and upon doing so, the unattached toes ripped through the shoe like a thin t-shirt and clamored on the ground like furniture falling over.

In the course of an hour, he managed to carry over the ear, the five unattached toes, the foot separated at the ankle, and the remaining leg, all weighing the same weight as the body as a whole did initially, and stuff it into the closet. He wadded up the linen from Daphne's bed under the space of the door as tightly as he could to keep the body parts in, and got himself out, still mindful of the glass.

He brings up the left arm with him into the door, with the draft coating everything in a clammy, disgusting chill. No body parts have managed to find themselves out of the door, so he opens the door, drops the arm in there, and promptly shuts it, wadding up the linen against the door again. He knows that the arm likely broke into more pieces, as he can hear the floor creak slightly as he leaves.

He brings up the left foot with him up the stairs, by this point now panting exaggeratedly, dragging it across the slick carpet, and sliding it into the closet, shutting it, and returning downstairs. The repetition, weight, and absurdity of the situation was starting to wear on Scooby, and he started appreciating that he even had anything on to wear... because of this, he always minded the glass so that for the pair he purchased, he could show some respect and to Daphne's pair, for basically the same reason.

The torso remains at the entrance, with the width being too much for Scooby to wrap his tail around, so he makes use of the rope again and fastens it around the body with intersecting wraps, and fastens his end to the rope, and makes a final struggle up the stairs. He starts to feel something tear, and looking back, the intestines have now appeared, as if they were fake and made out of rubber, start to dangle out of a tear in the torso and double the weight of the overall struggle. Quickly, with no regard for his own bodily safety, he strains with all of his remaining effort to get the body up the stairs and into the closet before the intestines fall out of the body. He opens the door and drags the remaining workload into the room. The door attempts to close but is stopped but the dense extension of intestine. As a final means of keeping the situation in order, he places all the parts of Velma evenly over the closet so as to not become too much weight against a single area, and manages to cover the entirety of the closet's carpet space, with some room in-between, with the parts of Dinkley, and he shuts the closet door, and stuffed the bottom space of the door with the linen, and walks with the glass crunching against his shoes and he leaves Daphne's room. He takes off the shoes at the outside of the closed bedroom, and he sets his bottom down on the upstairs carpet, with his legs on the few steps down, and allows himself to slide down the stairs, with his head softly thudding against each of the stairs down until he has his head rested on the bottom step; Daphne doesn't laugh.

* * *

In and out of the dreamless sleep the creaking from upstairs awoke Scooby Doo, who put it to the back of his mind, but worried regardless, that eventually the second story could no longer support the expansion of weight that was taking place in the closet and it was burst open from the bottom, collapsing the house. He thought of this, but brushed it to the side, for too much had happened in such a short amount of time for him to processing entirely. He draped the mat on the floor for the entrance over him as a blanket and tried to slip off into something less demanding.

Daphne could also hear creaking, and despite her not seeing what all else happened as was the case with Scooby, she had predicted the events properly in her head, and also was concern for the well-being of her house. Her parents would arrive back from wherever their combat web was stationed and see the caved-in house, uninformed and worried about what could have possibly have happened while they were away. We was also worried about what the butler will think when this happens as well; the butler also seemed to be pretty good about not going upstairs as per her wishes, but at this point she felt that if anyone else could intervene, seeing as how her foot is now shattered, then the butler would be the next best choice available.

She dragged herself back on the couch, with the wrapping of her foot sufficiently warm and cut back from the pain that was nearly fainting her earlier, and she turned on the television on mute, so she could also hear upstairs in case something urgent happened. The puppeteer was still vomiting.

When Scooby was awake, he listened intently to the sound of the creaking upstairs, when finally a different sound emerged from a closet. A dull, rhythm thumping started up, with a pattern of PM - pm,pm PM - pm,pm PM - pm,pm PM - pm,pm. The rhythm had a sort of swing do it, but it didn't sound destructive, but rather, inviting. The soft pounding closely introducing itself into his muscles, as he tried to shrug off the effect it was having on him, but to no avail, as he was now fully alert.

Daphne also noticed this started a while ago, and it wasn't too long until she paid attention to the television and saw the puppeteer move his puppet in rhythm to the beat, his bouncing knee mimicking the rhythm, and the puppet doing its pointing, but this time the puppeteer was intent on paying attention to the puppet and completely disregarding the camera. The crow wasn't anywhere to be seen in the picture.

Scooby felt his muscle fibers contracting in time with the beating, although not in unison with the rhythm, but rather as a backdrop utilizing two steady contractions to each of the patterns being banged out upstairs. His entire body felt like a simple, pulsing heartbeat and this point it was completely unignorable. He got up and guided his way over to Daphne who was waiting for him to come out from the corner, as eye contact was met from the instance she was available in Scooby's line of sight.

Daphne's head, stomach, and heart pounded once per pattern and produced a temporary bout of tunnel vision for each instance, although Scooby happened to be at the center of it. She also got up, ignoring the wrapping of her foot, and made her way towards Scooby. The rhythm of the house, previously distant, now rung through everything completely clear and became the house itself. Hand in hand, Scooby on his hind legs, they danced to the beat, with the puppeter providing a visual metronome in the back, as the flames of the fireplace swayed back and forth with exaggeration and mocking discipline, as if to say, "How dare you try to lock this up? This was never in your control. How dare you?"

They danced an abrupt, although not violent, participatory tango, with striking movements that clocked in exactly with the household rhythm, and it was hard to discern if the dancing was out of their control or if they had simply let it get the better of them, but it didn't matter. Heads thrashed backwards, clasped hands shooting diagonally into the air and back, a twirl from puppy and girl, and then back again from girl to puppy. The headband discarded in the bathroom, Daphne's hair covered her face in primal disregard, but Daphne's eyes betrayed her as a fighting, but underwater worry peered out of them, and Scooby's eyes complimented hers with a vacancy of both defeat and curiosity. Was she even dancing with a puppy? Was he even dancing with a girl? The glasses in the kitchen lifted its frame and lens up as if it was a head, and the ends of the frame supported its weight as if it were feet, and it clacked itself in rhythm slowly over past the kitchen into the hallway leading to the dining room.

Scooby jumped in the air with an overly energetic jumping jack, spun around with Daphne in precise footwork, and she proceeded to do the same, and these motions repeated themselves without variation for some time, as if to say that the dancing from before was merely the invitation to the purgatory I will now hold you in place in. Enjoy as your bodies betray your participation and as your minds betray your sense of being out of place.

The glasses walked themselves over the carpet of the dining room, being the only surveillance in the house.

The crow flew back into the television and the doorbell rang. This disrupted the up-till-now overruling steadiness with an arrhythmic attempt to recollect itself, but the card tower has spilled, so to speak, and the children were struggling to find their rhythm and, from there, their reason for their dancing, and they wearily found themselves shocked as to why they were dancing together and they found themselves embarrassed that they had lost themselves so completely and so unwittingly. Daphne started crying.

The doorbell rang again, but the door unlocked itself and the butler emerged from the opening door, shifting his eyes back and forth with concern and anticipation of evil. He noticed the splintered crack of the door from the outside, and also noticed the pair of glasses that were at the edge of the tile and the carpet of the dining room. He clipped them onto his lapel and walked over to the living room, where she saw Ms. Blake crying on the sofa.

"Things becoming tough at home, Ms. Blake?" He sat down next to her and offered a handkerchief for her to use. "You do realize you have my pager number and can summon me over at any time you please. I would be more than happy to assist you if something is troubling you." He allowed time for Daphne to capture herself before she provided a response.

"I... am usually fine, Jenkins. The past few weeks have been testing."

"Past few weeks? You seemed to have yourself together the last few times I paid visit." He looked down at the glasses he found but disregarded them for the time being. "You must be starving, dear."

Jenkins went to the kitchen and whipped up a sort of stew containing noodles and a light broth that was easily tolerable given anyone that was under large amounts of stress. In the meantime of it cooking, he placed a warm blanket over her shoulders and allowed her to recollect, as he noticed the condition of her foot.

"Did you drop something on yourself, Ms. Blake?" She seemed too stricken with worry to make up a convincing excuse.

"I... was arranging furniture, and it was an accident."

"An accident, I'm sure of, but furniture? Ms. Blake, did someone happen to intrude upon you while I was away?"

"Not intrusion, I invited some friends over."

"And did one of them hurt you?"

"No, it wasn't them Jenkins, they were fine. They were behaved."

"And I realize that none of your current friends wear glasses, which is why I am concerned to have found these by the front door." He slipped off the glasses and put them in a hand that Daphne happened to have an open palm for.

"I realize that you may be holding things back from me on account of the sort of hurt that you've been put through, and at the same time I can't say that I'm terribly surprised that it has happened. I do pay attention to the things that happen around me, as silent as I am, and I find that there is a most atrocious underpinning spreading itself across the town. It doesn't take a learned observation to realize that the community is loosening, softening if you will, under the influence of some sort of infection. The residents in town and the residents that leave town simply don't act as they should." He glances at the television to find nondescript commercials play through. "I'll get your food, Ms. Blake."

He comes back with food, and sees that Scooby is alongside her, sitting like a dog, with Daphne's hand scratching at his head. "Mr. Doo, I do believe it's been a while since I've last had the pleasure of seeing you." He looks at him with a curiously hopeless, questioning glare. "I am under the impression that we're all aware of this sort of business?" They both nod.

The cloth he's gripping with his other hand, after grabbing a book from a bookcase in the living room, he rests on his arm and puts the cloth on top of it, so it functions as a piece of paper, and asks to carry Scooby's pen, which he hands over.

"Everything considered, Scoobert, I quite fancy your pen." He screws the bottom of the pen to push out the point, and starts writing shorthand on the piece of paper. "What I'm writing has no concern to either of you, as it's merely explaining to myself what you both already know. So, shall we provide for a discussion? If you'll allow, I prefer Ms. Blake start." Scooby offers no answer.

"Scooby started coming over here a while back, but that's insignificant to what's happened starting a few weeks ago. I had friends over. These were never particularly good friends, but they offered some sort of company, and they turned their backs on me."

"Did you provide them a reason to turn their backs to?"

"Well, I encouraged them to act imbalanced. I didn't think they'd follow through with what they followed through with."

"Children have the incentive to impress and surprise, if you give them sufficient incentive." He writes scribbles on his cloth. "So they got out of control. Did they damage the property?"

"Nancy, one of the girls over, she broke a window in my room."

"This was three weeks ago?" He glanced over at Daphne disapprovingly. "That's not quite as urgent right now, I suppose. So have they come back since?"

"I've managed the have the door locked except when Scooby knocked."

"How are you so sure they didn't? That window's been broken for about a month, maybe they slipped back in and exploited your belongings without your knowledge."

"I... the house is silent, I would have heard them stumble around the roof and walking upstairs."

"Children don't weigh very much. The particularly bright can slip in and out without you realizing it. Enough though, I'll assume with you two that they haven't come back since. Then what happened?"

"They also hurt my arm while there were here, and Scooby helped me get it patched up and disinfected and everything... but I haven't felt quite right since that happened. I just sort of let them do as they pleased, they noticed this out of me, and they attacked me because of it."

"I'll have to inform Mr. and Mrs. Blake that their daughter needs to develop some sort of backbone, although maybe I can't trust them to supply a backbone if they themselves are losing it in that so-called Spider Club theirs." This forces Daphne to look up at Jenkins with nearly-offeded awe.

"Yes, Ms. Blake, I do find myself quite unfond of the fact that your parents have agreed to partake in such an insufferable means of self-exploration, but I am even more unfond of the prospect that they left you behind to figure out what to do on your own." Scooby nudges his head a little as a subtle jab against Daphne. "You didn't disappoint, but you didn't impress either. The upkeep I bring is still painfully necessary."

"Yes, Jenkins. Please stop getting sidetracked so we can continue with this."

"Am I getting sidetracked, Ms. Blake? A considerable amount of these problems seem to be caused by your willingness to let them happen to you. The world is full of snakes, observing the roads, the buildings, and the outdoors looking for people like you who simply don't know any better. They are a cruel, but necessary service."

"So we can agree that I need to change what I'm doing, Jenkins. I fully understand that. It was apparent to me before you even arrived. You need to listen about what else has happened here!" Jenkins allows her to continue.

"I've tried to keep a level head, and watch what I do, and I thought that was working... and yet I couldn't bring myself to go upstairs."

"At all?" Jenkins opens a closed eye at her.

"It's painful to even think about!"

"Those kids could very well be up there right now, Ms. Blake!"

"They're not... we checked earlier today, right Scoob?" Scooby gets up and walks in front of Jenkins. "Do you mind?" Scooby moves his tail to the other side. Jenkins nonverbally allows him to start.

"I've been... like about everyone else in town. Something's corroding at my foundations. I've seen things that I'm not sure are real. I needed to go over to Daphne's and see her... so I could at least share what was happening to me with someone... or at the very least have someone to be scared by how I acted so I could know that I should be scared as well." Jenkins scribbled away with Scooby's pen.

"I was supposed to sign a bill with that pen." Jenkins looks up at Scooby with open eyes. They offer a paradox of cold, calculated distance and warm subservience.

"You, a bill, Scoobert?"

"It was a bill that would've held some sort of significance to the town I happened to sign it. I... don't really know how I got the opportunity at that sort of power, it was just handed to me. I don't pretend I know the mechanics of this town, because as of then, I am fundamentally lost."

"So, a bill."

"They said it would change the way that parents were allowed to treat their children and kept it at that. I was under the impression it was going to result in something that would disallow children to reach the same conclusions that I have reached, through the decisions I had to make, and so-" Jenkins held up his hand to stop Scooby. His eyes were now closed.

"Yes? Your conclusions are to be strived for? You think you've grown in such a way that leads you to demand it happens to everyone else? The same development of your character? You've found a golden ticket?"

"I believe so, Jenkins. I seem to have an advantage t-"

"You don't." The coldness of Jenkins took the breath out of Scooby's lungs. "You don't have any idea. You're uninformed. You've indulged in yourself long enough to find no sort of answer you can provide for anyone else. You've buried yourself in thought exercises. You've blown into the same balloon for 18 years, Scooby Doo, and there's nothing in it but your own stinking air." He slid the pen to stay on his ear. "So you didn't sign the bill?"

"No."

"And why, Scoobert?"

"Because I was uninformed."

Jenkins expression turned grim, the little that he could provide. "I'm... under the impression that you've known for a while about what I just told you, is that right?" Scooby nodded. Jenkins tried to include a sliver of empathy, but couldn't bring himself to it.

"Although you can speak, Scooby Doo, there is a covering on your mind that has blocked you from forming a direct connection to anyone else. Because you can't form this connection, you've developed a skill of evading connections by posing as different characters. You simply can't show it, and you might be unaware of just how much it shows through to other people. A dog that can communicate. I bet you forget you're a dog, for the most part. So when you didn't sign the bill..."

"They were confused, and worried, and disappointed... and needed to hear me say it over and over again. It wasn't like they were being aggressive as much as they banded together to try to insist from me that perhaps I wasn't thinking through with my actions... and I took my pen back from the man that was circling points to me on the bill, and I left."

"Well, they were in the wrong as well, then. I don't quite understand how you got their fervent support. You must've pulled some unintelligent raffling to get them so convinced that you could help them."

"I did. They bought everything I made myself out to be."

"And you, with your lack of discipline, were so willing to abuse it like you've abused it thousands of times before." Jenkens took the pen from his ear and started writing again. "Go on."

"I bought myself sneakers I had heard good things about from a grocery store... it's more than a grocery store but the majority of the space is there for food. Purchased them, walked back, saw a wall of beetles, crossed a previously normal bridge now otherworldly, and walked through the neighborhood pleasantly enough. I didn't find that the people around me have changed much."

"That's because you accept the formalities from them as their complete character. They understand that they can make do with keeping you at the surface of their lives. Everyone goes a little deeper, Scooby."

"...and I wound up here, again. I realize that as well, Jenkins. That's why I came back here."

"To hide?" Scooby's defeat from before seems compounded.

"To hide."

"Hiding, I find, is commonly misconstrued to be parallel to self-exploration. You think you're given the upper advantage of those around you when you can devote so much time to yourself. This isn't completely wrong, but whereas you gain one advantage, Scooby, the peers of yours that struggle with their environment alongside others, also struggling, make so many more advantages. The scary thing about this is that they don't even realize it. Someone, of your disposition Scooby, would organize and thrive off of these advantages to... who knows what Scooby? A historical figure? You wouldn't even find the prospect rewarding if you were in the position Scooby... but things are not that way. You're walking a solitary path, and that paths lead you straight to the grave." Jenkins pauses for a moment. "Daphne, why is the door damaged so?"

Scooby and Daphne glance at each other with knowing eyes. Jenkins takes note of this and his expression changes from answer-providing to concerned.

"Yes, Ms. Blake?"

"A head."

"I beg your pardon?"

"A head, Jenkens. Velma's head."

Jenkins slowly develops a concerned near-scowl at Daphne. "What about Velma's head?"

"It came down the stairs and slammed into the door, damaging it." Daphne felt completely empty about what she was saying, as if the concept was too ridiculous to mull on about after what they had just been discussing. Scooby felt like he had been snapped back to the urgency of the matter after such critical examination of his life from someone more knowing, and the despair set in again.

"And did you do this, you two?" They shook their heads. He leaned closer over to them. "Are you sure?"

"It appeared at the top of the stairs and rolled down." Jenkens paused again, eyes flaring. "What makes you think that it was Velma?"

"It's not. It's her head, for sure, but it doesn't actually belong to her."

"To whom does it belong?"

"It's in Daphne's closet. I carried it up, piece by piece. Everything weighed much heavier than it should've, and it moved on its own, trying to go back down the stairs." Jenkins glanced over to Scooby, then to Daphne, then to Scooby, and then to the glasses on Daphne's hand. He takes the pair from her and looks examines it quickly, glancing at his reflection in them. "Did you use the hose outside?"

"Yes, she came out of the microwave covered in mud."

"The kitchen is completely clean."

"We... were too preoccupied with a body coming out of it."

"Obviously. I'm sure it took your minds completely off of it. Daphne, when mud gets tracked into the house, you simply have to clean it up. There are no ifs, ands, or buts about this." Jenkens puts the glasses on properly, on his face, and gives off a short breath.

"Ah yes, just as I thought. It's still all there." Jenkens walks over to the kitchen and examines an invisible mess, scanning from the microwave to the kitchen counter and outwards, a foot away from the backyard door.

"Jenkens, how are you making these connections?" Daphne has the kitchen in her complete attention. Jenkens continues examining the extent of mud that is not revealing itself to anyone else.

"I'm not. They're simply coming to me as suggestions." He takes the glasses off, throws them on the ground, and stomps them. He pushes it against the floor, fanning his shoe against it, crunching the frame and glass completely out of shape. A single loud thump is heard upstairs. Jenkens glances up.

"I'm afraid... that we are going to have to go up there and deal with this before it deals with us any longer." Without suggesting the children follow him, he walks briskly over down the hallway without for an instance inviting the children to follow him, but Scooby and Daphne follow suit, desperately trying to follow him. They get to the stairs, and see the sliver of Jenkens' pants disappear from view, and they follow up the stairs, Daphne's foot pain worsening. They get over to him, door open, in Daphne's room, noticing the violent stormy draft billowing into her room, Jenkens glancing against it in the pose of a butler. "Dear Heavens." He allows it to only distract him for an instant, and he proceeds to peel the linen out from under the closet, throw it to the side, and open the door. The storm intensifies outside, with lightning flashing and an outpour of rain shivering across the entire neighborhood, although none of it dares come into the room. The butler attempts to talk back to the children, but the sounds of the storm are too great to hear the words coming from his mouth. If you can read lips, though:

"I am frightened to inform you, dearest dog and dearest girl, that I cannot have you join me at the present time. For I must consult with Ms. Dinkley and establish, with someone of her intellect, as to why she bothered to show up here and terrify the both of you to such a great extent. The pieces of this puzzle are not falling for me either, my dear children, and without a doubt I may not find them here, either. Nevertheless, this consultation is vital into ensuring that I keep you two safe. It is my duty, and my occupation, and my call to being, to see to you that you both get out of here and persuade with you an urgency that, I am having trouble ascertaining has ever EXISTED on this PLANET..." He glares at both of them with the gravest of anticipations. "...to not come up these stairs again." Scooby, who was now Shaggy, and Daphne, who was now Velma, walked backwards out of the bedroom door as Jenkens stared at them, and then he proceeded to shut the closet door behind him.


End file.
